Posted on 10/23/2013 1:22:55 PM PDT by Renfield
A dental study of 1,200 molars and premolars from 13 hominin species shows that no known species matches the expected profile of the last common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also provides evidence that the lines that led to Neanderthals and modern humans diverged about 1 million years ago – much earlier than previous studies have suggested.
“Our results call attention to the strong discrepancies between molecular and paleontological estimates of the divergence time between Neanderthals and modern humans. These discrepancies cannot be simply ignored, but they have to be somehow reconciled,” said study first author Dr Aida Gómez-Robles from the George Washington University.
Dr Gómez-Robles and colleagues use techniques of morphometric analysis and phylogenetic statistics to reconstruct the dental morphology of the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.
They conclude with high statistical confidence that none of the hominins usually proposed as a common ancestor, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. erectus and H. antecessor, is a satisfactory match....
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
No. They were looking at the teeth themselves, morphologically, not at DNA from those teeth.
They found that teeth from homo antecessor did not closely enough match our own to be considered -- in their opinions -- as common ancestors with Neanderthals.
I'd say that's fine, since the truth of the matter seems to be highly complicated, and may-or-may-not directly include homo antecessors.
So this study simply tells us that science is still a long way off from finding definitive answers.
I remembered the 20 percent number from somewhere, and probably got it wrong. iT IS heck getting old.
my apologies.
I figure the neandertal men thought the homo sapiens girls looked cute...
Since apes have one more chromosome than humans (two ape chromosomes are stuck together to make one human chromosome) that would probably be the big dividing line. After that happened, there would be little breeding across that line.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neandertalis would both be on the same side of that divide.
Through God all things are possible.
It is a weak theory that demands and depends on persistent miracles but can’t predict when the next one will occur.
That is a problem. It is best to avoid the appearance of having a “Jam yesterday, and Jam tomorrow, but never Jam today” religion or science.
>>It is a weak theory that demands and depends on persistent miracles but can’t predict when the next one will occur.
You’re right. It’s a weak theory. Since I do not create worlds or populate them with life, I do not have to know all the details of how it is done. Its like automatic transmissions: I know that they work, I know vaguely how they work, and I know a guy who fixes them. That’s all I need to know. I know a guy who creates universes and he’s good at it so I’ll leave the details to him.
Any evidence that he created a universe?
Any evidence that he is good at it? What would be ‘good at it’? How would that be different from ‘bad at it’?
You know a guy that fixes universes? How do you know? What universes has he fixed? What distinguishes ‘fixed’ from broken? If the guy who created the Universe was so good, how did it get broken?
Your statements to me seem so foolish that they are not even wrong.
>>Your statements to me seem so foolish that they are not even wrong.
Thank you for the endorsement. Quite often, it is important to see who is opposition to know how correct one really is. From your comments in the bicycle thread, I recognize you as a vile excuse for a human being, so your lack of faith is expected.
From your comments on the bicycle thread, I identified you as a believer in magical thinking, with no affiliation to conservatism.
The simple rules of cause and effect promote virtue. If you believe in magic, then you can commit any vile act, and then pretend that you didn’t really want the obvious bad consequences to happen because magic should have prevented anything bad from happening.
There is no virtue without reality. There can be no sin, if good acts are punished by magic and bad acts are made good by magic.
>>From your comments on the bicycle thread, I identified you as a believer in magical thinking, with no affiliation to conservatism.
The correct term is “supernormal” , not magical. And that has nothing to do with conservatism, unless your form of conservatism is unbridled greed and slavery to the elite. (And it wouldn’t surprise me that you do believe in exactly that.)
>>The simple rules of cause and effect promote virtue. If you believe in magic, then you can commit any vile act, and then pretend that you didn’t really want the obvious bad consequences to happen because magic should have prevented anything bad from happening.
Again, I do not believe in magic. But, I do believe in a higher power who holds us accountable in the ultimate rule of cause and effect. Since you believe that life is finite and virtue is just a fear of physical consequences, then you can believe that nothing is sin as long as it doesn’t cause you any pain. Your comments in other threads bears this out.
>>There is no virtue without reality. There can be no sin, if good acts are punished by magic and bad acts are made good by magic.
See above. You believe in worldly consequences. I believe in worldly and eternal consequences. You are a hedonist (i.e. “if it feels good, do it” and the converse, “if it hurts, don’t do it”). I feel sorry for you.
I note that medieval monks were not hedonists, but were not doing very well against the Turks until those darn virtuous and consequential protestants, who had subordinated the magical church to civil authority, rescued them.
Of course the Jihadists of that day and this believed in the supernormal as you put it.
I just don’t see any good consequences from swapping momentum with a truck with me on a bicycle.
Good luck with your miracle if that happens.
Shudder at the thought of no beer....
If Aminita muscaria, perhaps, or perhaps Ergotism from fungal infections of wheat. I don’t know the evolutionary time line for either of those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism
Thanks. I’ve seen that. It’s the New Testament without the divinity of Christ.
But, certain paradoxes apply here.
The first is from CS Lewis. We have to assume one of three things about Jesus:
1) He was a liar.
2) He was a madman.
3) He was what he said he was.
If 1 or 2 is true, then Jefferson is a fool for listening to a liar or a madman. If 3 is true, then Jefferson missed out on the true greatness of Jesus.
But, just in case Jesus never made any claims and this is all the work of a traveling band of con artists, known as the Apostles, there is another paradox.
If they were lying, why did they suffer horrible deaths to sustain the lie? Surely, after the stoning of Stephen, they would have melted away into the countryside to resume their simple lives.
So, they saw something that made them willing to die, one at a time after living a life on the run.
Then, comes the third and final paradox: what if they never lived either and this is all a fabrication of the Council of Nicaea. Well, then we have the greatest conspiracy in the history of man, but Jefferson is still a fool for following the teachings a fictitious man, as written by fictitious apostles, compiled by an evil cabal of liars.
Simply put, if you don’t believe the divinity of Jesus, then why even pretend that he is significant. Go be a Buddhist. At least there is external evidence of his existence and his teachings are much more comprehensive.
There is another option. Jesus didn’t write the gospels. Other people did. They wrote them long after the events happened, and had their own motivations for what they included and didn’t include.
John Allegro wrote ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ describing one potential motivation for the author of some of what became “Mark”.
We know that some parts of Matthew were being added to as late as the 4th Century. Later additions probably have little to do with who or what Jesus may have been.
I was in a Little Tokoyo hotel (in Los Angeles) recently, and they had a Buddhist book, placed neatly alongside the Gideon Bible and the Book of Mormon.
So was Moroni a liar, a madman, or was he what he said he was? Was the book of Mormon a hoax? Is it a great conspiracy, despite Joseph Smith Jr.’s death for his teachings?
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