Posted on 08/06/2010 4:19:00 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Anthropologists have unearthed the remains of an apparent Neanderthal cave sleeping chamber, complete with a hearth and nearby grass beds that might have once been covered with animal fur. Neanderthals inhabited the cozy Late Pleistocene room, located within Esquilleu Cave in Cantabria, Spain, anywhere between 53,000 to 39,000 years ago... Living the ultimate clean and literally green lifestyle, the Neanderthals appear to have constructed new beds out of grass every so often, using the old bedding material to help fuel the hearth... Cabanes, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science's Kimmel Center for Archaeological Research, added that these hearth-side beds also likely served as sitting areas during waking hours for the Neanderthals... artifacts collected from various other Neanderthal sites suggest the inhabitants prepared stone tools, cooked, ate and snoozed near warming fires... The bedding material was identified based on the presence and arrangement of multiple phytoliths from grasses near the hearth area. Phytoliths are tiny fossilized particles formed of mineral matter by a once-living plant... While the hearth contained some grass phytoliths, most belonged to wood and bark, "indicating that this material was the main type of fuel used," according to the researchers. Some animal bones were also tossed into the hearth, perhaps to dispose of them after dinner and/or for use as extra fire fuel... Earlier this year, Josep Vallverdu of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and his team identified a "sleeping activity area" at Spain's Abric Romani rock shelter. Similar to the Esquilleu Cave finds, Vallverdu and his colleagues discovered the remains of hearths spaced enough for seating and sleeping areas.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
I must admit, I couldn’t contain my laughter when I read that human-chicken-chimp comparison, earlier. That was so silly, it almost seems like someone did that deliberately, to undermine the Creationists.
There’s only a couple of DNA specimens available (so far, but the number will never be large). The old one (the one done with mitochondrial DNA back in the 1990s) only came up with a few hundred base pairs (out of a presumed original in excess of 16000 base pairs), about a quarter of one percent. There’s still a pretty weird bias against Neandertal, it comes from a 19th c martinet, Rudolph Virchow.
A recent one (past year or two) uses nuclear DNA, and shows a tiny difference here and there. Since this is a single Neandertal that was used for the research, and a long period of time since he died, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’ll be interesting when the “gracile” “anatomically modern” archaic human remains have their DNA sequenced. :’)
There’s some stupidity floating around the web (and FR) about both studies, and it comes from non-scientists who constantly have to shift their claims because they don’t know what they’re talking about, and saddle on anything that appears to support their a priori assumptions.
Morphology (still) rules! See my second post in this topic.
Were? Hell, some are still kicking.
And not looking too friendly, either.
They invented soup, musical instruments, hats...
sound cozy.
The liberal Neandertals were all named Ugh — it was the sound they made after they were tossed over the cliff. :’)
Your argument should be with the scientist at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/nature08700.html
The Nature paper expressed the mismatch between this data and standard evolutionary interpretations in a more muted tone: Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation.1 Autosomes are the chromosomes other than the X and Y.
So, the human Y chromosome looks just as different from a chimps as the other human chromosomes do from a chickens. And to explain where all these differences between humans and chimps came from, believers in big-picture evolution are forced to invent stories of rapid wholesale rearrangements, and rapid generation of both new gene-containing and regulatory DNA.
God made man and all life. That is my story, you and others can invent your own. Oh, you have, amoeba to man in a few billion years or whatever.
The “halfway between a chimp and human” B.S. originated in a tabloid called India Express, but has been plastered all over, including on FR. Imagine the level of a mind that can claim that humans don’t have a common ancestor with apes, but that another form of primate is halfway between man and ape...
It comes off as a pretty lame joke, not really an axegrinding, IMHO.
/bingo
Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were merely a troll, and that I was wasting my time.
Figures they were smokin’ grass, eh? Buncha hippies.
Oh, you are one of those. Sorry, wrong group, my bad.
She probably got the other cave in the divorce.
If these Spanish neanderthals are our ancestors then where is their paella? Betcha can’t answer that one.
Dude looks like he is pissed as to how some sticks were bundled.
That emotion transcends species.
Wrong is wrong, especially as regards bundling.
“How did they celebrate diversity with the Neanderthal gay community?”
They all became gay, and went extinct.
The rate of Y chromosome evolution is much higher than the rest of the genome, and if most creationists knew any actual science, they would know that - but usually they don't.
The more educated someone is the less likely they are to be a creationist. Especially if they are educated in science. Creationists sources are aware of this and play to their audience.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716201127.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20551442
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16299764
The absence of homologous recombination between the X and the Y chromosome leads to gradual degeneration of various Y chromosome genes on an evolutionary timescale. The absence of recombination, however, also favors the accumulation of transposable elements on the Y chromosome during its evolution, as seen with both Drosophila and mammalian Y chromosomes. Alongside these processes, the acquisition and amplification of autosomal male benefit genes occur.
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