REUTERS/NIKOLA SOLIC
The picture above showcases the typical life of a Neanderthal family in a cave.
Posted on 09/29/2018 12:06:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
REUTERS/NIKOLA SOLIC
The picture above showcases the typical life of a Neanderthal family in a cave.
If someone called you a Neanderthal, you wouldn't take it as a compliment. But according to the latest paleoanthropology, it's not that bad.
In one of my favorite commercial series, Geico features a Neanderthal living in the modern world, constantly getting offended at the way people talk about cavemen like they're stupid. This Pleistocene holdover, you see, is sophisticated, sensitive, more likely to visit a club than to hit you with one.
It's no wonder he had a hard time in the modern world. From the moment their remains were first discovered in Europe and the Middle East over a century-and-a-half ago, Neanderthals have been portrayed as primitive, apelike brutes, dragging their clubs around, and grunting nonsense. Writing at The New York Times several years ago, David Frayer tracked the treatment of these extinct people back to the mid-1800s, when Neanderthals were labeled "freaks" and "idiots," "incapable of moral or religious conception." In fact, the scientific name originally proposed for Neanderthals was Homo stupidus!
But fresh evidence now is rehabilitating Europe's earliest inhabitants and their kin. Last year the New York Times ran a story entitled "Neanderthals Were People, Too," detailing new research that would make Geico's caveman proud.
Turns out Neanderthals were artists who mixed their paints in a subtle rainbow of shades. They produced symbolic images and adorned themselves with feathers and eagle-talon pendants. They could sail surprising distances, they traded, used herbal medicines, and even buried their dead with supplies for the afterlife.
And despite decades of consensus that Neanderthals were incapable of speech, Australian scientists announced in 2013 that fossilized Neanderthal hyoid bones, which anchor the tongue, were indistinguishable from our own.
And now, a new genetic theory is challenging the long-held idea that modern humans, with our superior brain power, drove Neanderthals to extinction. Apparently, many of our ancestors got along quite well with Neanderthals. DNA sequencing suggests that most people alive today are part Neanderthal—an average of 2 percent, and as high as 6 percent in some regions. In fact, an estimated 80 gene sequences around today come directly from Neanderthals.
The mixing of ancient human groups, it seems, was far from rare. A paper published last month in Nature describes how a toe bone from a Siberian cave represents the first confirmed cross between so-called "species" of human. Genome analysis reveals that an adolescent girl to whom the toe bone belonged had a Neanderthal mother and a father who was a member of the Denisovans—another group of ancient humans who left their mark on our DNA.
According to zoologist Ernst Mayer, if two living things can produce fertile offspring, they're members of the same species. And Neanderthals, "modern humans" and Denisovans all produced such offspring. So we're living proof!
Why then, asks the Times, did science get Neanderthals so wrong for so long? Well, a major part of the answer are the evolutionary assumptions that have long clouded our thinking on the origins of mankind. Scientists have long interpreted extinct groups of humans as primitive and apelike. But it seems increasingly difficult to deny that Neanderthals were human; and if human, then created in the image of God. Geico's cosmopolitan caveman wasn't as much of a stretch as we thought.
The lesson of the Neanderthals is that storytelling too frequently masquerades as settled science, and that worldview assumptions often are passed off as hard data. Science got Neanderthals wrong because too few scientists were interested in getting them right. And remember, it wasn't that long ago that entire groups of humans were portrayed as primitive and apelike because of similar Darwinian assumptions.
Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.
Looks like my ex-wife’s family getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner.
Neanderthals could breed with homo sapiens, so they were the same general species.
The Jimmy Castor Bunch, Troglodyte song & vid comes to mind.
Neanderthals interbred with the “Cro-Magnon” version of mankind, and several racial types are descendants of this crossbreeding, most generally from the land east of the Urals.
Caucasians may not be as racially pure as has been depicted by the Aryan race theories.
In many instances, the greatest error our ancestors made, was to become our ancestors. But now I am thinking like Aldous Huxley, who was not a great fan of what humanity has come to be.
Earlier than that, and it gets a bit...fuzzier.
The lesson of the Neanderthals is that storytelling too frequently masquerades as settled science, and that worldview assumptions often are passed off as hard data. Science got Neanderthals wrong because too few scientists were interested in getting them right.
And remember, it wasn’t that long ago that entire groups of humans were portrayed as primitive and apelike because of similar Darwinian assumptions.
I have always disputed the Neanderthals as Humans theory.
You may believe whatever you like, but I believe I was Created by the Creator of all Creation. IMO, belief in Evolutionary Theory is unfortunate - why would anyone claim to have ancient primates in their family tree?
Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.
They still are. Look around, they are still here .
Piltdown Man says “hey, what about me?!”
The lesson of the Neanderthals is that storytelling too frequently masquerades as settled science,
...Yeah...don’t it?
...and they still vote Democrat.
In many instances, the greatest error our ancestors made, was to become our ancestors.
.......
This is pretty much why Martin Luther revolted against the sale of indulgences.. (A system by which the catholic church held the ancestors of europe hostage. But for a fee they could get their ancestors out of purgatory jail. It was a business.
Luther said the catholic sale of indulgences was unbiblical and caused witchcraft. Judging by its effect on whole denominations today —I would say Luther was correct,
It isn’t the genes we have, it’s the idiot nihilistic Left wing ideologies that glorify the state and reduce people to abstractions of persons.
Ethnic Europeans have on average 2.7% of their DNA traceable to the Neanderthals. Asians are a bit less but there are still detectable amounts and they range from 1-2% from what I’ve read. The Neanderthal DNA was particularly useful and is particularly concentrated in the immune system. That makes sense given they were in those colder climes for much longer and had had time to develop resistance to the diseases carried by the local flora and fauna while the later waves of humans coming out of Africa had not had time to develop resistance.
Congressman Al Green D-Texas
It is very interesting about the basque people and the possibility they have a plethora of Neanderthal genes...
If neanderthals are a separate species, so are East Asians.
And so on.
Ultimately different races, not a different species.
It is, BTW, no surprise that early scientist saw them as a different species. It hadn’t been that long before that that it had been a not uncommon scientific view that black persons were essentially just a related sub-species. That just being black made one substantively different from being white (a view, I might point out, that is mainly only held by Leftist and black persons these days).
In the past I’ve pointed out that this “scientific” view ultimately lay behind justification for anti-miscegenation laws, that these were the basis for persons not having the same status before the law and therefore being unable to marry. This would be similar to how slave could not marry free (no matter the race) or common not marry a royal or a legal child marry an adult or an idiot marry. I also pointed out that when the cause for different status before the Law went away, in was the case for when the view that black and white persons were substantively different fell, then the statutes based on that difference would inevitably crumble and such common law rights as the ability of a man (eligible to marry) to marry a woman (also eligible to marry) would trump the holdovers from bad science.
And, yes, I did point these things out to show how homosexual “marriages” are far different than interracial marriages, for the latter ultimately had no affect of the nature of marriage being between a man and a woman where the latter sought to completely alter the covenant by removing the logical and moral demand that each partner adds a specific diversity to the union ... whereas homosexual shackups simply lack the diversity of partners that the institution requires.
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