The neanderthal DNA findings do more (much more) damage to evolutionism than they do to any other religion including Christianity. The findings totally break the chain. There is nothing on this planet which modern man could have evolved from; you’d need some new hominid closer to us in both time and form than the neanderthal and that creature, had he ever existed, would be very easy to find.
” you’d need some new hominid closer to us in both time and form than the neanderthal and that creature, had he ever existed, would be very easy to find.
—Neandertals overlapped with homo sapiens the entire time they were here. And the fossils are easy to find - they are found throughout europe, africa, and asia.
Both Neandertals and Homo sapiens probably split from Homo heidelbergensis.
Neandertals were never really viewed as an ancestor of Homo sapiens, since Neandertals are no older than Homo sapiens. The question has been whether Neandertals and Homo sapiens interbred, and whether Neandertals should be viewed as fully Homo sapiens (which is what I’ve always seen Creationists argue - this is probably the first time I’ve seen otherwise), or whether they should be seen as a sub-species, or maybe even as an entirely separate species.
The point is, the mtDNA sample from Homo Heidelbergensis (thought to be an antecedent of Neandertal) was so tiny that it told literally nothing, it was a GIGO study. Regarding breaking the chain, there is no chain to break, those 1990s results could do nothing and did nothing to the evolution model of human descent.