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Europeans never had Neanderthal neighbors. Russian find suggests Neanderthals died out earlier.
Nature News ^ | 05/11/2011 | Ewen Callaway

Posted on 05/11/2011 7:41:02 PM PDT by 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.

(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: europeans; evolution; godsgravesglyphs; neandertal; neandertals; neanderthal; neanderthals
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To: Little Bill

LOL - “In the good old days, you would have been left as an infant on a windy crag to die...”


121 posted on 05/13/2011 12:11:38 PM PDT by patton (I am sure that I have done dumber things in my life, but at the moment, I am unable to recall them.)
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To: SunkenCiv
Well, well. This thread has, shall we say, wandered from the original topic.

I'll just say those Russians would have to accumulate a lot more evidence to convince me Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens didn't overlap in Europe.

122 posted on 05/13/2011 12:18:01 PM PDT by colorado tanker
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To: colorado tanker
The last of the Neanderthals ended as Texas BBQ, minus the spices. We have not, Historically, treated our neighbors well.
123 posted on 05/13/2011 12:33:29 PM PDT by Little Bill (Sorry)
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To: allmendream
“Raw meat” and “blood” is a lie. Your picture is microscopic fragments - not “raw meat”.

Funny... Microscopic fragments of wood are still wood; microscopic fragments of iron are iron; microscopic fragments of copper are copper.....

But you're claiming microscopic fragments of raw meat are not raw meat... Care to tell us how that works or what sort of principle might be involved??

Posted on FR, Dinosaur Soft Tissue Issue Here to Stay.

You guys are not going to wish this one away or make it go away by waving your hands and singing "lalalalalalala..." to yourselves.

124 posted on 05/13/2011 1:30:49 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
Microscopic “meat” would be composed of myosin filaments like all muscle. There is no myosin detected there.

Blood would be composed of cells with a phospholipid bilayer a cytoplasm and hemoglobin. There is no hemoglobin detected there.

Microscopic fragments of demineralized fossil are exactly that - not “meat” and “blood”. If it was “meat” or “blood” it would test positive for myosin and hemoglobin. The only biomolecule detected so far is fragments of collagen - the number one constituent of bone - and only trace amounts of that.

Sad that your “Young Earth” trump card is such a joker - and you had to lie about it.

125 posted on 05/13/2011 1:51:24 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream
They started being about to sequence dinosaur proteins around 06 and that was before they found the intact hadrosaur, God knows what all they've gotten out of that one by now....

I mean, this stuff is real and you're only making yourself look stupid calling people liars for talking about it.

126 posted on 05/13/2011 2:44:21 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
Well then - I am SURE that if all they can get is collagen fragments - hadrosaur proteins are waiting right around the corner!

Myosin collagen and hemoglobin can all be readily detected - and yet they are not.

You lie when you say this is “meat” and “blood” when it is demineralized fragments - the only detected biomolecule (the rest is mineral) so far has been collagen.

Meat would have myosin. Blood would have hemoglobin.

All you have are desperate lies! Rather pitiful.

127 posted on 05/13/2011 2:52:52 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream
Updated: Besides fragments of collagen - fragments of elastin and laminin were also found via antibody binding. Further confirmation and sequencing of the fragments awaits hopefully. The sequence run from the T-rex collagen shows that the collagen is similar to birds - as would be expected given the proposed evolutionary relationship.

Not “meat”. Not “blood”. Immunoreactivity to protein fragments and collagen fragments similar to bird collagen in sequence.

128 posted on 05/13/2011 3:08:42 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream
In 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.” Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”

Now, granted some of the materials found were in somewhat degraded states; nonetheless they should not have been found. The theoretical max possible time limit for those kinds of materials surviving is in the thousands or tens of thousands of years, and not in the millions.

129 posted on 05/13/2011 3:24:35 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
It was certainly thought to be - but the red blood cell looking structures are not blood cells - they are fossilized blood cells without even (so far) any detectable biomolecules - let alone hemoglobin.

To say that it was “meat” or “blood” is a lie.

It may be a lie you are particularly enamored of - but it is a lie.

So why don't we ever find dinosaur BONE? Why is it always made out of fossil mineral and not collagen bone? And we never seem to see human bones fossilized to the same extent?

If dinosaurs existed within the last six or so thousand years - their bones would still be bones - not minerals - and wouldn't we at least ONCE find them in the same strata - if they co-existed? Why do they always seem to be found under the iridium laced ash layer at the K-T boundary?

130 posted on 05/13/2011 3:44:09 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream
they are fossilized blood cells without even (so far) any detectable biomolecules

Proteins ARE "biomolecules(TM)".... Again they started sequencing dinosaur proteins in 06.

None of the stuff Schweitzer and others have been finding should be there according to evoloser/deep-time theories.

131 posted on 05/13/2011 4:21:27 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
They sequenced ONE protein - fragments actually - of collagen.

They have detected via immunoassay two other proteins - elastin and laminin.

Dr. Schweitzer says they are millions of years old - and it is really cool that protein fragments can survive that long.

Why the need to lie and say protein fragments amid mineral is “meat” and “blood”? Because you are a Creationist and have to lie about science if you are going to talk about it at all.

So why would God create something “halfway between a chimp and a human” in DNA that is so like human? Do you have an explanation for where these ape-men all fit in? It no doubt is a doozy!!!

Sock it to me!

:)

132 posted on 05/13/2011 5:08:17 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream
So why would God create something “halfway between a chimp and a human” in DNA that is so like human? Do you have an explanation for where these ape-men all fit in? It no doubt is a doozy!!!

Not ape men, just apes. Very advanced, extinct apes.

You shouldn't look down on apes, at least not at gorillas. Gorillas could be taught to speak English if they had voluntary control over breathing and some of the ones which have been taught signing check out as having IQs in the 90+ range. That's adequate for a significant fraction of American jobs.

133 posted on 05/13/2011 7:02:35 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
Neanderthals were just apes then - but lived like men and had larger brains.

If they were just apes then - 1 to 4% of our ancestry is neanderthal ape.

We too are zoologically apes. We are not even, genetically, the “odd man out”.

Among all the apes living - the two closest in DNA are humans and chimps.

134 posted on 05/13/2011 8:30:51 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream
If they were just apes then - 1 to 4% of our ancestry is neanderthal ape.

That part of it is wishful thinking on somebody's part. There is zero evidence on the planet of humans and Neanderthals ever having interbred. It's another one of those things where there should be huge amounts of evidence and the fact that nobody can find any says it simply wasn't possible.

135 posted on 05/13/2011 9:06:21 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: wendy1946
The same guy who did the work your lame citation characterized as “halfway between” is the same guy who showed the evidence (huge amounts) of the 1-4% Neanderthal ancestry of European or Middle Eastern populations, he is not nobody, and it certainly WAS possible to combine the two. Species much more different in DNA do interbreed successfully.

Amazing how the scientist is the ultimate source when you think a mischaracterization of his work proves your point, but in his subsequent work he is a nobody.

Do you realize how idiotic that makes you look?

136 posted on 05/13/2011 9:59:26 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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To: allmendream; SunkenCiv; blam; All

I was hoping you would post the graph near the end of the article, it shows a much wider spread. Could you do that? While gorillas may be very smart, the are even farther from us than the chimps. The subspecies of chimp called the Bonobo, is closer to us than other chimps. I think I saw the figure 1.6% difference as opposed to 2%. They even like to make love face to face, unlike the other chimps.


137 posted on 05/14/2011 12:30:51 AM PDT by gleeaikin
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To: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
Funny how this is all theory and made up crap based on whatever the popular story of the ages they need to support... sorry... I love science, but a lot of what I see reported seems less than the standards I was taught.

They start with their end game hypothesis...agenda.. and then seek to prove it. Shouldn't they just seek and then evaluate what they find? The search to prove their hypothesis seems to contribute to a lot of the ridiculous findings.. a. la.... global warming.. which is now referred to as "climate change".

138 posted on 05/14/2011 12:40:14 AM PDT by antceecee (Bless us Father.. have mercy on us and protect us from evil.)
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To: antceecee

The theories of the possible relationships between modern humans and Neanderthals has changed numerous times in recent decades as new evidence and new techniques have become available. The disagreement among Anthropologists between those who think we are related and those who think we are not is strong and approaches the sort of disagreement that arose among planetary astronomers when Pluto was downgraded from planet to ‘minor planet’ a couple of years ago. True science does not have a ‘party line’, unlike pseudo-science like the global warming true believers.


139 posted on 05/14/2011 1:28:51 AM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: gleeaikin

140 posted on 05/14/2011 7:04:42 AM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
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