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Thanks Red Badger. This suffers from a false premise. Neandertals were human, and continue to be.

Their huge eyes likely gave Neanderthals superior low-light vision, letting them manoeuvre in the dark for ambushes and dawn raids.

That sounds an awful lot like a ridiculous Australian comic book that once in a while gets advocated as if factual by the notorious Ted Holden, who has been banned from FR under a bunch of different nicknames. Under at least two nicknames, Ted has cited some trash tabloid's claim that Neandertal was halfway between modern humans and chimps. That's moronic.

It is just a fact that Neandertal DNA is found in most people of European ancestry, and more and more among people in Asia, when they get their DNA tested. The average percentage of Neandertal DNA found in living humans is about the same as that of each of your 4th-great-grandparents. As more Neandertal DNA is sequenced (not that much has been done) the known percentage is likely to increase.

I saw a documentary where they had all the kids in a large college class get tested to see how much Neanderthal DNA each had.

The fascinating result (that they did not comment on overtly): *all* of the really hot blond women had the largest percentages. And the guys who were high in it were the ones that looked like women would probably think them handsome.

just a random data point, but an interesting one IMHO.

Crazy Ted Holden has an interesting take on the impossibility of the larger dinosaurs having the muscle strength to stand in Earth’s current gravity. Elephants are as big as it gets on the planet these days. Ted presents data on muscle strength as a function of cross section of muscle mass vs compression loading on legs and hips and tension loading on necks and tails. The largest dinos stood around 40’ tall. Computing for pressure gives a pressure of about 18 lbs in sq, whereas human blood pressure is about 2 lbs per in sq. A human blood pressure of 3 lbs per in sq would blow out into an anurism and cause blood to leak into the lymph system and cause fatal swelling throughout the body. So unless dinosaur had galvanized pipe for blood vessels, there is a serious hydrostatic issue there.

Additionally, the cantilever forces on neck and tail sinews with the dino’s neck extended horizontally would tear any sort of collagen molecule cabling that known biology would be capable of.

There is also the problem of pressure head in pumping blood to the dinosaur’s head. Giraffes are barely able to pump blood to their brains and easily suffer cardiovascular collapse when highly stressed. Pumping blood any higher than a giraffe’s head would lead to congestive heart failure and bleeding out through capillary permeability.

Frankly, I think crazy Ted hammered it on this one, but I am aware that he goes off the deep end on other of his fave issues. And, yah, neanderthal eye sockets aren’t really that much bigger than cromagnon eye sockets, and eyeball size certainly is no indicator of enhanced night vision.

Here’s a suggestion - instead of waving people off a particular theory as crackpot, why not point to the crackpot’s evidence and let people decide for themselves. Here’s Ted’s analysis of dinosaur scaling -

http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/biganims.html