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 ...
Name calling is not proving a point in a debate or discussion. Your guys have to make up a theory, when it falls apart, then they make up another. The Big Bang is now a sitcom, gota love it.
Jesus Christ was a man, died for your sins, all you have to do is believe (make Him your Lord). You will have everlasting life, remembering that God raised him from the dead. Read the Book, it will open your heart and mind. Don’t be afraid.
God loves you.
That would feed a few neanderthals.
You have a response from wendy who has argued against the latest scientific opinion in other posts. It is estimated that chimps have about 98% similar genetic material to us. I think I saw somewhere that the Neanderthal might be something like 99.8%, but am not certain. Also, recent genetic studies indicate that humans have from 1 to 4% identical genes to those of Neanderthals. Specifically, the Celtic red hair, blue eye, pink skin may be Neanderthal, which gives an advantage in absorbing the sun’s rays to produce Vitamin D. This is essential in the formation of good bone structure, especially well formed pelvis for childbearing in northern climes. Try Googling “Recent Neanderthal Research.”
After reading the back and forth comments since I sincerely answered your Comment 3, I see your request for information was insincere. Suggest you and wendy run off together to the Religion Forum, and leave us science oriented folks to suffer happily in our own way.
Since we spend considerable time trying to understand this fascinating universe that was created, however it might turn out to be, the result is that less and less of the simplistic stories of multiple uneducated people collected in a Book after a Committee decided to throw out quite a number of such stories that did not add up to a consistent story to satisfy the political needs of the Emperor Constantine are of any interest to us. Nor will they ever be.
Off-topic, but Constantine was dead before the New Testament was Canonized. Creationists are not the only ones who make uninformed, simplistic, statements.
My son, if thou wilt receive my words, and hide my commandments with thee;
So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding;
Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding;
If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures;
Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.
Proverbs 2:1-5
But they both carry the UAW Parasite.
What you have done is academic fraud. Were you a practicing scientist, you could have your research grants revoked, future eligibility denied and have your tenure withdrawn (yes, you can lose tenure - when you engage in the kind of sleazy tactics you just attempted to resort to.)
In brief, the abstract of the article to which you refer makes none of the extravagant claims that you attempt to make it make.
There are no scientists who regard Neandertal as halfway between living humans and chimps. None. Nada. Zero. Luckily for people on FR who like cheap entertainment, there’s an ever-shifting series of names that regurgitate the same garbage before they get banned:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1322006/posts?page=186#186
To: Charlespg
>never heard that before
I have. DNA studies pretty much indicated that the neanderthal was a glorified chimpanzee.
186 posted on 01/16/2005 7:28:44 PM PST by judywillow
http://www.freerepublic.com/~judywillow/
Thanks!
and /bingo
and, no, there was no namecalling in your post, nice job!
/bingo
The first draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome has provided the strongest evidence yet that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred and that all non-Africans today have Neanderthal gene fragments in their genetic codes. Although the Neanderthal contribution to the DNA of these individuals is estimated at being just one to four percent of the total, the finding, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, helps to resolve the long-standing controversy over whether or not humans mated with Neanderthals when the two groups encountered each other outside of Africa... co-author David Reich... and his colleagues analyzed over one billion DNA fragments taken from Neanderthal bones -- dating to approximately 38,000 years ago -- found in Croatia, Germany, Russia and Spain. Although 95 percent of the fragments consisted of bacteria and microorganisms that colonized the Neanderthal remains, special DNA isolation and anti-contamination measures enabled the scientists to piece together over 60 percent of the entire Neanderthal genome... compared the Neanderthal DNA to samples taken from present-day humans in southern Africa, western Africa, China, France and Papua New Guinea.
A reconstructed head based on a Neanderthal skull found in France is shown. -- Sven Traenkner (c), "Safari zum Urmenschen" ("Safari to Human Ancestors") exhibition, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Frankfurt, Germany
Idiots! Quit focusing on DNA and science. Don’t you realize this may be the exact bed where Ayla got her bones jumped by a Neanderthal? We’re looking at an altar, not just a rock and grass bed.
(Quick! Somebody post the requisite pic of Darryl Hannah from Clan of the Cave Bears and the discussion will get focused back on the right track)
No reason not to keep it civil, although the repeated attempts to ‘save my soul’ after I have already been saved is annoyingly patronizing.
I notice that nobody really wants to talk about the facts.
They say in the Law that if you can- argue the Law, if you can't argue the Law-argue the facts, if you cannot argue the facts - attack their character.
“Tommy ows yer soul?” RKipling
Music to sooth the Neanderthal within!
Scientists make theories. Sorry if that offends you. The way a theory works is that if a more accurate theory comes along, it is replaced. That is how science works.
Jesus Christ is Lord. The heavens proclaim the glory of God. It is not all a trick and a lie with starlight speeds and radio-isotopic decay to make all things look the expected age. The dice are cast, but every result is from the lord. Chance doesn't mean that God is not in control. The fact that stars are forming right now through gravity and nuclear fusion doesn't mean that God did not create those stars. God created me from dust, and to dust I shall return. Yet I was also created through a cellular process involving DNA. Was the creation of Adam from dust more literal than me being created from dust?
Notice the ape-like barrel shaped torso and ribs; human torsos are much more elongated.
The Neanderthal sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA. Researchers compared the Neanderthal to modern human and chimpanzee sequences. Most human sequences differ from each other by on average 8.0 substitutions, while the human and chimpanzee sequences differ by about 55.0 substitutions. The Neanderthal and modern human sequences differed by approximately 27.2 substitutions
Half of 55 is 27.5. Don't take my word for it, try it on your own calculator.
That explains the previously big mystery described by James Shreeve in his 96 Discover article "Neanderthal Peace" as to why there had never been any real evidence of human/Neanderthal interbreeding despite the two groups living in close proximity for long periods of time, i.e. despite there being substantial reason to expect such evidence to be common and easily found.
From Shreve's article:
Whatever the tools suggest, the skeletons of moderns and Neanderthals look different, and the pattern of their differences is too consistent to dismiss. As anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico has shown, those skeletal differences clearly reflect two distinct patterns of behavior, however alike the archeological leavings may be. Furthermore, the two physical types do not follow one from the other, nor do they meet in a fleeting moment before one triumphs and the other fades. They just keep on going, side by side but never mingling. In his behavioral approach to bones, Trinkaus purposely disregards the features that might best discriminate Neanderthals and moderns from each other genetically. By definition, these traits are poor indicators of the effects of life-style on bone, since their shape and size are decided by heredity, not by use. But there is one profoundly important aspect of human life where behavior and heredity converge: the act that allows human lineages to continue in the first place.Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.
Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.
Of course, to interbreed, you first have to meet. Some researchers have contended that the coexistence on the slopes of Mount Carmel for tens of thousands of years is merely an illusion created by the poor archeological record. If moderns and Neanderthals were physically isolated from each other, then there is nothing mysterious about their failure to interbreed. The most obvious form of isolation is geographic. But imagine an isolation in time as well. The climate of the Levant fluctuated throughout the Middle Paleolithic--now warm and dry, now cold and wet. Perhaps modern humans migrated up into the region from Africa during the warm periods, when the climate was better suited to their lighter, taller, warm-adapted physiques. Neanderthals, on the other hand, might have arrived in the Levant only when advancing glaciers cooled their European range more than even their cold-adapted physiques could stand. Then the two did not so much cohabit as time-share the same pocket of landscape between their separate continental ranges.
While the solution is intriguing, there are problems with it. Hominids are remarkably adaptable creatures. Even the ancient Homo erectus- -who lacked the large brain, hafted spear points, and other cultural accoutrements of its descendants--managed to thrive in a range of regions and under diverse climatic conditions. And while hominids adapt quickly, glaciers move very, very slowly, coming and going. Even if one or the other kind of human gained sole possession of the Levant during climatic extremes, what about all those millennia that were neither the hottest nor the coldest? There must have been long stretches of time--perhaps enduring as long as the whole of recorded human history--when the Levant climate was perfectly suited to both Neanderthals and modern humans. What part do these in-between periods play in the time-sharing scenario? It doesn’t make sense that one human population should politely vacate Mount Carmel just before the other moved in.
If these humans were isolated in neither space nor time but were truly contemporaneous, then how on earth did they fail to mate? Only one solution to the mystery is left. Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed in the Levant because they could not....
Racial differences amongst present humans are subspecies differences. The difference between modern humans and Neanderthals is a species difference.
Similarly there is, according to the latest study, a detectable amount of neanderthal DNA in modern humans of European and Middle Eastern descent.
The thing I mainly claim is idiotic is the claim that we AND the Neanderthal are alike descended from some more remote common ancestor. That's still like claiming that dogs are too remote from wolves to be descended from them, and therefore must be descended directly from fish.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
