Posted on 03/18/2012 5:24:33 PM PDT by varmintman
Danny Venderamini's main site.
All Neanderthal images here courtesy of www.themandus.org
This thing starts off with Danny Vendramini figuring out something which should have been figured out 100 years ago i.e.. that (other than for the larger brain area) a Neanderthal skull is a near perfect match for ape profiles and a very bad match for one of ours:
That is consistent with what we know about Neanderthal DNA i.e. that it's no closer to ours than to an ape's. The funny thing is that Vendramini did not tell his artist to produce the world's scariest monster, the basic order was to start with Neanderthal skulls and skeletal bones and try to flesh them out using the assumption that what you had was a bipedal, carniverous ape with an 8" fur coat (like every other ice-age animal) and the big eyes which Neanderthal eye sockets suggest for nocturnal hunting, and possibly a slightly mean look on the thing's face. The fact that what turns up looks as bad as it does to us is probably, as Vendramini suggests, due to past bad experiences with it, sort of like the instinctive human reaction to spiders and snakes:
The 8" fur coat also explains why no Neanderthal needles have ever been found...
Without the fur coat:
Given the recent human population bottleneck, there is no way to believe that any modern human is related to this creature in any way other than for the possible re-use of low-level genetic components by an original designer or designers (the bottleneck says that if any human had any of this guy's genes we all would, not just Caucasians and East Asians), and likewise there is zero way to believe that any modern humans ever interbred with something like that. The image of the Neanderthal in popular culture and science turns out to be rubbish.
This thing was wiped out in some sort of a stone age world war and whoever wiped it out did the world a giant favor. Other than that, Danny Vendramini subscribes to a variant of the Gould/Eldredge flavor of evolutionism, nonetheless the scholarship involved in reconstructing what Neanderthals actually amounted to does not suffer from that.
All that shows us, is that Neanderthals are not only scary looking, but that they also were intravenous drug users.
GREAAAAATTTT.....
So yer walking down the alley, and THAT thing asks you for spare change. WONDERful.
Good eye. The fur bikini is all about utility.
WHICH MEANS that Neanderthals would have tended to have a base-8 numbering system.
Perfect for computers.
Neanderthals would have dominated computer tech in our age. GLAD THEIR DEAD!!!!
Yeah...they were tough and strong...but Cro magnon was smarter and had better weapons. The academics say we “out-competed” the Neanderthals. Yeah...if by out-competing you mean chasing, killing and (perhaps even) eating them.
You betchya!
Here's a picture of a caveman commander using a touchscreen computer to deploy troops.
Beats the heck out of base twelve, but giants likely wouldn’t have concerned themselves with advanced computation. They had the little people for that, lol.
Well, if he’s using UNIX, he’s got better tools...
I think Gary Larson summed it up succinctly. A group of hominids, clothed in skins & holding torches & spears are taunting a group of Neanderthal passersby:
“Nyahh, nyahh—can’t make fire, can’t make spear.”
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/france/index.php
And can’t abstract animal images on to cave walls.
FYI Laz, there should a bull figure shown on a large stalactite doing something in conjunction with the lower half of a female figure.
30,000 years ago, what kind of man reads Caveboy? A suave, self-assured, assisted-spear chucking, fairly hairless man with an eye for the finer things below the glacier.
That’s who.
“The academics say we “out-competed” the Neanderthals. Yeah...if by out-competing you mean chasing, killing and (perhaps even) eating them.”
If they actually had 8” long hair it would be simple to kill one, tan the hide, and have a nice fur coat and pants with no sewing required.
The ability to send dogs in to kill Neanderthals AND act as warning systems probably helped in any inter-species war.
The dogs likely would have been too valuable to risk attacking the Neanderthals at close quarters. Mainly fire and casting weapons, but particularly the atlatl. The dogs’ job was keeping humans safe at night and in the dark.
I’m sure the reaction comes from decades of horror movies, which frankly have more credibility than this Australian free-form fantasy based on bad sci-fi.
Not a Neanderthal.
Thanks for the pings though.
Thanks all. This Aussie stuff is entirely invented by the author, and isn’t based on morphology. It’s more like something Virchow would have come up with if he were still alive. He kept getting crazier with his denials and finally reached the point where he said the Neander fossils were of a 17th century Cossack with rickets who’d stripped naked and hid in a cave where he’d died.
From the depictions down through the decades, Neandertal in a suit:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol306/issue5693/images/small/40-1-thumb.gif
muawiyah, not needles, but I came across Neandert-awls while looking for the suit pic:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol306/issue5693/images/small/40-2-thumb.gif
sadponies, another “wilma” pic:
http://www.philipsonphotography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/MG_0182-1-950x633.jpg
And interbreeding with them! Or not, as that little scientific debate always seems go back and forth every few years.
The fur coat business is a major assumption for which there is no evidence.
One obvious problem, every adult Neanderthal who ever lived had some sort of a little bag of tools which he or she carried around at all times and if any of them had needles, they all would have and the exhaustive searches of tools in the main caves in which Neanderthal remains are found would have turned up lots and lots and lots of them since for any creature which needed clothing at that time, a needle would have been a main tool. One needle in this case simply would not cut it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/05/neanderthals-genome-anthropology
"But which specific traits gave us such an advantage that we were propelled to global glory at the expense of the Neanderthals? In the suite of behaviours that we evolved in Africa 150,000 years ago, what were the characteristics that really made a difference and can therefore be considered as defining human attributes? There are many candidates – complex language and superior memory, for example. However, among many scientists there appears to be consensus that imagination and opportunism were critical attributes.
"This meant, says Fagan, that we learned to use local materials – antler, bone and ivory – in ways Neanderthals simply could not imagine. In one case, this resulted in "one of the most revolutionary inventions in history: the eyed needle, fashioned from a sliver of bone or ivory," he adds. While Neanderthals shivered in rags in winter, humans used vegetable fibres and needles – created by using stone awls – to make close-fitting, layered clothing and parkas: the survival of the snuggest, in short.
The author of course is simply assuming the Neanderthals were "shivering in rags" since nobody has ever found a Neanderthal needle or the numerous such which you WOULD find if they'd ever had them. He was unaware of Vendramini's thesis.
I can understand the pain you must be experiencing with the loss of the cute little humans-from-hominids fairytale, but I can’t really feel it (the pain), possibly cause I’m laughing too hard....
as a sort of a more refined and mature individual or "business executive Neanderthal", that is, a Neanderthal of wealth and taste, and the others (with the mean looks):
as just redneck Neanderthals. That might help you make the whole thing go down a bit easier...
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