[SunkenCiv]

Neandertals are among our ancestors.

The Neandertal Enigma
by James Shreeve
in local libraries

"Frayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]

[ek_hornbeck]

Yes, they account for about 1-2% of our DNA today (at least if you're of European or Asian ancestry, Africans have none). It's like coyotes in the northeastern US and SE Canada having some wolf ancestry as well. But the original H. sapiens were not descended from Neanderthals.

Neanderthals were our (ugly) kissing cousins, not our direct ancestors.

[ek_hornbeck]

My point was that anatomically modern humans existed before interbreeding with Neanderthals, in the same way that coyotes existed before interbreeding with wolves in eastern North America. If Neanderthals never existed, humans would still be around in much the same form as they are now, minus about 1-2% of non-coding DNA and some genes involved in adaptive immune response. So most of us have traces of Neanderthal ancestry, but Neanderthals were not the immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans - something like H. rudolfensis probably was.

In any case, it's good to have these discussions without having the thread hijacked by some loon who insists that there were no people (or anything else) before 6,000 years ago!