(A Neanderthal Human Hybrid)
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 ...
Notice how antsy Europeans get when Iceland starts puffing away? They know!
Neanderthals are simply a slightly different version of our own type of human being ~ right down to the DNA.
The only thing halfway to a chimp would, of course, be another chimp ~ there are several species and they are quite different from us and other varieties of our kind.
‘This is a joke, right?’
No. There are caves in the ME where Neanderthal remains are find both earlier and later than Homo Sapiens remains, showing that they had overlapping habitation in the area, where Africa meets Europe.
Very obviously the timing of all of this movement into and out of Africa is related to what the ice ages were doing at the time. There are about half a dozen of them that definitely affected Europe and Asia over that period, but there are a full 21 cycles (according to the Antarctic ice cores), and they influenced our development as well.
‘I was always led to believe that they wre just an earlier form of modern man~~ Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and modern man....’
I don’t think that this theory has had any supporters since the early 19th century, when Neanderthals were first identified. The Cro-Magnons WERE Homo Sapiens Sapiens (modern man).
It is also related to the existence of the Gibraltar land bridge, allowing migration from Africa to Europe without the Middle East digression, IMHO.
Reading the fossil record is akin to reading a book with most of the pages torn out. The shared DNA suggests more rather than less contact but the questions are where and when.
They were a lot smarter than bears, and today bears regularly try the door handle on a car before bashing in the windows!
If it were me, I would have taken the ferry.
They didn’t die out. They vote Democrat, believe in Global Warming, support the eugenics of Planned Parenthood and can’t understand why a BA in French Impressionism doesn’t qualify one as CEO of Goldman-Sachs....
They didn’t die out. They vote Democrat, believe in Global Warming, support the eugenics of Planned Parenthood and can’t understand why a BA in French Impressionism doesn’t qualify one as CEO of Goldman-Sachs....
Soviet scientists tried to create super workers by crossing apes and humans and the same thing happened as would happen to any human/Neanderthal pair stupid enough to try to get one of them pregnant, there were no survivors amongst the subjects.
HA. I’m old but not that old. Ha. Well, My college anthropology courses spoke of the evolution of man from the early man to Neanderthal to Cro Magnon to Modern Human. Of course there is a constant evolution, as man has changed noticeably just since our arrival on this continent. Men of the Revolutionary War and Great War of Northern Aggression were much smaller and shorter lived than are we, so we can see evolution in our own families.
‘Soviet scientists tried to create super workers by crossing apes and humans’
Love to see a source for that!
The increased size of 20th century Americans seems to be from improved nutrition and health care and not from evolution.
I remember continuously asking this European teenager on a forum I used to be on, exactly how we evolved. I never got an answer from him.
I doubt I’ll get an answer from any other Liberal, either.
‘I remember continuously asking this European teenager on a forum I used to be on, exactly how we evolved’
There are currently two basic theories. One is that evolution was driven by a process known as natural selection, in which mutations which led to greater likelihood of reproducing were maintained and others died out. The other is that the designer of the universe used evolution to create the current observed reality.
Did Neanderthal and Homo Sapien ever meet? All I can say is look at almost any white NFL offensive lineman, case closed.
“The liberals will not like the idea that humans and Neanderthals did not have sex.”
Well, they may not have had a kind of sex that would result in children, so hope springs eternal.
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