Europeans never had Neanderthal neighbors. Russian find suggests Neanderthals died out earlier.

Nature News ^ | 05/11/2011 | Ewen Callaway

[SeekAndFind]

The first humans to reach Europe may have found it a ghost world. Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains suggest that the archaic species had died out before modern humans arrived.

The remains are almost 10,000 years older than expected. They come from just one cave in western Russia, called Mezmaiskaya, but bones at other Neanderthal sites farther west could also turn out to be more ancient than previously thought, thanks to a precise carbon-dating technique, says Thomas Higham, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

The implication, says Higham's team, is that Neanderthals and humans might never have met in Europe. However, the Neanderthal genome, decoded last year2, hints that the ancestors of all humans, except those from Africa, interbred with Neanderthals somewhere. Perhaps humans departing Africa encountered resident Neanderthals in the Middle East.

"DNA results show that there was admixture probably at some stage in our human ancestry, but it more than likely happened quite a long time before humans arrived in Europe," says Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Cork in Ireland, who is lead author of the latest study. "I don't believe there were regions where Neanderthals were living next to modern humans. I just don't find it very feasible," he adds.

Time horizon

Carbon dating of stone tools characteristic to humans and Neanderthals, as well as their physical remains, has previously given the impression that the first humans to reach Europe, between about 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, shared the continent with Neanderthals long established there.

[patton]

I am going back to the other valley and huddle in my cave.

Actually, I AM in my cave. LOL.

[wendy1946]

I have upwards of 70 semester hours of math courses. You don't sound like somebody who'd ever get past a calculus course.

Other than that the use of viruses to add features to particular living creatures appears to have been involved in genetic engineering and re-engineering in ancient times, which had nothing to do with evolution. We use the same techniques ourselves.

[patton]

“You don’t sound like somebody who’d ever get past a calculus course. “

Heh. Heheheheh.

No, I suppose I don’t - I am blunt, dislexic, a lousy typer, and not particularly concerned with spelling. I have also shave exactly once this year, and pretty much look like the unibomber. I am even wearing a hoody.

In your 70 semester hours of math, were you able to prove whether the countable chain condition implies that a space is compact?

I have never solved that one - and my graduate advisor in maths told me no one else had, either. After he let me stew on it for a year or so.

Complete this sentence: “For all Epsilon > 0, there exists delta > 0, such that...”

If you cannot, you know exactly crap about calculas.

And the function does not continue.

[patton]

for every ε > 0 there exists a δ > 0 such that for all x ∈ I, |x-c| < δ => |f(x) - f(x+c)| < ε

[wendy1946]

Complete this sentence: “For all Epsilon > 0, there exists delta > 0, such that...”

If you cannot, you know exactly crap about calculas.

And the function does not continue.

First sentence could apply to any sort of convergence situation but I'd have to be smoking whatever you are to try to guess what that third sentence means... Try laying off it for a few days.

[patton]

The answer is in #104.

It is the litanny of all advanced calculus students - you know, the ones studying “Real analysis.” Not my term - the name of the course.

It is the class where undergraduate math majors go back and PROVE everything they learned in calculus.

More simply put, it is the definition of continuity.

Like life - it is a continuum, and ever changinging. Some changes enhance your chances; some don’t.

That iss all part of the genetic algorithm.

[patton]

Oh - the third sentence was the clue. “Continue”...”Continuity...”

“And the function does not continue...”

See? It is the definition of continuity.

Math joke.

Like this one;

a=b=1
ab=aa
ab - bb = aa - bb
b(a-b) = (a+b)(a-b)
b=a+b
1=2

[blam]

"Finally, both of you need to add me to your ping lists. It has only been 11 years we have been having this discussion... "

Yup.

In all that time, I've managed not to have had one ping list.(Is that bad grammar?)

Should it be: I managed to not have had one ping list.

(Anyway, I ain't got no ping lists)

[patton]

Me neither. I depend on you guys.

Hey, I’m lazy! LOL!

[blam]

Late Neandertals of Russia's North

[gleeaikin]

By “humans” is meant Homo Sapiens, not Homo Neanderthalis. An earlier European was Homo Heidelburgensis, probably the precursor of Neanderthal. While Neanderthal may have died out earlier in Eastern Europe, there seems to be credible evidence that they existed in Spain later than 30,000 ya, and given the existence of the “ginger gene” in significant numbers of northern British and Irish, they probably survived there as a remnent population. Current genetic studies indicate that we have from 1 to 4% Neanderthal DNA.

I think my late husband was a 4 percenter. He had long torso, short legs, very muscular and strong, red hair, light blue eyes, very hairy even on his shoulder, strong brow ridges, weak chin, crystaline almost transparent teeth edges, and a warrior temperment.

[gleeaikin]

Evolution is far more complicated and sophisticated than you make out. For one thing there are genes that evolved over 1/2 billion years ago that are still in use today. Their outward appearance may change, but fundamentals are conserved, modified and reused. For example, the segmented earthworm, the segmented insect, the segmented spinal cord are all of a piece. In an interesting experiment, eye cells of a mouse were placed in the legs of fruit flies, and the mouse implants developed as compound insect eye tissue. How is that for amazing. Try reading Sean Carrol’s book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which explains this process in endless fascinating detail.

If you are still not convinced, at least you will have the newest information to do your arguing against, rather than the dated ideas you are currently struggling with.

[gleeaikin]

There is no way that Neanderthal are midway between humans and chimps. The common ancestor of humans and chimps was at least 6 million years ago. The common ancestor of Neanderthal was around 1/2 million ya. See below and the link for the entire article Unfortunately the chart did not copy but if you look at the article the bottom chart shows most emphatically that Neanderthal is much closer to humans than chimps are, definitely NOT midway:

The first complete Neandertal mtDNA genome
In 2008, the first complete sequencing of Neandertal mtDNA was announced (Green et al. 2008). A complete mtDNA genome of 16,565 base pairs was extracted from a 38,000 year old fossil from the Vindija cave in Croatia. As Krings et al. 2007 had done, the authors created a graph showing the numbers of base pair differences for humans, chimps and the Neandertal when compared against humans. Because they were able to compare across the whole genome rather than a small portion of it, the differences between humans and the Neandertal was far more striking:

Green: human/human comparisons; Red: human/N’tal comparisons; Blue: human/chimp comparisons.
X axis, the number of sequence differences; Y axis, the fraction of pairwise comparisons. (Green et al. 2008)

Among the humans, the sequences had between 2 and 118 differences. The number of differences between the human mtDNAs and the Neandertal mtDNA varies from 201 to 234. The miniscule overlap between the human figures and the Neandertal figures in the original graph has disappeared and instead there is now a sizeable gap between the human and Neandertal results. Green et al. concluded that:

Analysis of the assembled sequence unequivocally establishes that the Neandertal mtDNA falls outside the variation of extant human mtDNAs, and allows an estimate of the divergence date between the two mtDNA lineages of 660,000 ± 140,000 years.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mtDNA.html

[gleeaikin]

Check out my comments #113 and #112 for some interesting links and information.

[wendy1946]

Evolution is far more complicated and sophisticated than you make out. For one thing there are genes that evolved over 1/2 billion years ago that are still in use today.

You think you're not going to get called for bullshit like that on this forum??

The PLANET is not that old. Robert Bass once redid Lord Kelbin's heat equations for the planet WITH a maximal figure for radioactive elements included and came up with an upper bound of around 220M years. That's before you even get to the recent finds of raw meat and blood in tyrannosaur remains which are supposedly 70M years old, i.e. which are proclaimed to be 70M years old by the same people telling you that anything on this planet is .5B years old.....

[SeekAndFind]

RE: b(a-b) = (a+b)(a-b)

That’s the alchemy right there: a-b = 1-1 = 0

You’re creating a new rule about: 0/0

:)

[patton]

I SAID it was a joke....

;)

[allmendream]

“Raw meat” and “blood” is a lie. Your picture is microscopic fragments - not “raw meat”.

Try positive antibody binding for collagen - and artifacts that look like the impression of what was once a blood cell.

You think you are not going to get called for bullshit like that on this forum?

They are said to be 70M years old by the scientist who demineralized them and assayed them for collagen.

If this is your “Young Earth” trump card - why the need to blatantly misrepresent what was actually found?

[allmendream]

Nice work. Yes - clearly not "halfway between".

[Little Bill]

Outside of Geometry most math is a construct developed to make (supposedly) complex calculations simpler and thus more complex and saving Mathematicians from being exposed at birth.