Neanderthals and human lived side by side in Middle Eastern caves and even interbred

Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 9-29-2012

[Renfield]

Neanderthals may have lived side by side with early humans and possibly interbred with them, according to new research.

Stone axes and sharp flint arrowheads of both branches of the human race have been discovered in limestone caves in northern Israel.

The findings, reported in the Times, have led archeologists to believe the two sub-species found harmony in a coastal mountain range that today is in a state of war with its neighbours...

[ANGGAPO]

Of course it means something. How do you think the Democrats got so backward. It's in their DNA, from a few thousand years ago. Connect the dots.

[ApplegateRanch]

“Neanderthals and human lived side by side in Middle Eastern caves and even interbred”

Inter-bedding does not necessarily result in interbreeding, though I have no doubts that inter-bedding occurred.

No evidence to present, but logic based upon human-dog; human-chicken; human-sheep; human-goat; human-camel; human horse; human cow; human-swine---but I repeat myself on that one--cases of interspecies sex makes this one almost inevitable.

[null and void]

Making, of course, the assumption that Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens Sapiens really are different species.

[null and void]

When you see one representation of how Neanderthal might have looked, something in your deepest genetic material shrieks, "RUN OR KILL IT!!!"

Or, in your case, "I'd hit it"...

[varmintman]

Neanderthal DNA turns out to be almost exactly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee That's a fact, regardless of how many times SunkenCiv or anyboy else might deny it or call me a liar for stating it. There is also the question of Neanderthal footprints, which are very definitely not human:

That's from the Natural History Museum in Prague.

The Neanderthal was the absolute apex predator of ice-age Europe and had spread out to other regions as well, particularly the Levant. He walked on two feet, made stone implements and weapons including thrusting spears, scrapers, and knives, and was certainly more intelligent than any other creature in his environment prior to the arrival of modern humans although it's been noted that some of his physiology and behavior resembled that of big cats more than that of humans:

http://thesubversivearchaeologist.blogspot.com/2011_11_20_archive.html

So, I thought I'd do a wee comparison between a modern day "top" carnivore and our cousin's, the Neanderthal, face. Do you see what I see in the image below? It looks as if the felid and the Neanderthal face have more in common than either has with the modern human.

The lion has a keen sense of smell. Which of the bipedal cousins do you think has the better sense of smell? Relative to the rest of the face, the big cat has a nasal aperture that's equivalent in size to that of the Neanderthal. Not so that of the modern-day hominid on the right.

A cat can spot its prey from 3 km away. Can you? Do you think the Neanderthal could?

The cat has dagger-like fangs and molar teeth that would put a deli meat-slicer to shame. "Aha!" you might say, "that chap from Forbes quarry couldn't be as effective as the lion--it doesn't have the appropriate dental accoutrements!" Umm. It's possible, isn't it, that all those flint flakes lying about came in handy for more than whittling?

Gargett also notes that if you try to draw a human-like Neanderthal with the eyes and nose as large as the bones indicate they would have to be, what you end up with is outlandish:

Given all of that, people were starting to wonder if in fact Neanderthals might have had fur coats and the astonishing answer to all such questions has arrived in the form of a massive study by a New Zealand scholar by the name of Danny Vendramini and may be viewed at a website (www.themandus.org) and a youtube video.

What Vendramini noticed early on is something which scholars should have figured out a hundred years ago i.e. that Neanderthal skulls, other than for much larger brain area, are a very good match for primate profiles and a very bad match for ours:

Vendramini's reconstructions take all of that into account as well as the much larger (than ours) eye sockets and nasal areas and, again, the results are startling (Some images without the 6" ice-age fur coat for illustration purposes):

The most startling thing about the creature is the eyes. Dinosaurs had eyes like that as do several very old kinds of animals, lemurs, tarsiers, bush babies and possibly one or two others. Vendramini assumes the eyes were adapted for nocturnal hunting but we have nocturnal creatures in our present world which don't have anything like those kinds of eyes and my own guess is that those eyes were adapted to a world which never experienced anything which we'd call daylight at all.

In sharp contrast to all of that, Cro Magnon artwork shows the earliest humans on the planet to look entirely like us:

Judge for yourself whether you think there'd be any possibility of humans and Neanderthals "interbreeding(TM)".....

Judge for yourself also which of the two creatures (Neanderthal or human) would be better fit for taking on mammoths and wooly rhinos with thrusting spears.....

[Condor51]

Neanderthals may have lived side by side with early humans
and possibly interbred with them, according to new research.

[varmintman]

Run or kill it...

I've got three very minor issues with Vendramini's reconstructions:

• I don't believe the slit eye pupils would have been necessary i.e. I don't believe the creature ever say daylight as we know it.
• I suspect the fur would have been reddish and not dark grey, as the DNA studies suggest.
• I don't think they'd have been walking around all day with fight faces on as Vendramini's artist shows most of the cases.

The image I like best is the one I call Fred, who seems to be a more calm and thoughtful individual, possibly a business-executive Neanderthal, that is, a Neanderthal of wealth and taste:

[Verginius Rufus]

Those who believe that the Neanderthals were a different species call them Homo neanderthalensis (no sapiens in the name).

There are some studies which claim that a small amount of DNA in some modern-day people is of Neanderthal origin, but that may be disputed. The last I recall is that the common ancestor of our species and the Neanderthals was about 500,000 years ago--but opinions may vary on that.

There is a very good recent book on the Neanderthals (by that title) by Friedemann Schrenk and Stephanie Muller (with an umlaut over the U), originally in German but an English translation was published in 2009.

[Verginius Rufus]

Maybe some of the Neanderthals had fur coats--made from bearskins, perhaps--but others wore good Republican cloth coats.

I'm not saying that Pat Nixon was a Neanderthal, mind you.

[ravenwolf]

I can,t call you a liar because i don,t know exactly what you are saying.

Also i take with a grain of salt what scientists say on many things.

Science starts either by accident or theory and is usually built on from there, for instance the idea of the air plane most likely started with a theory, we now have the airplane but how many theories were tried and failed before one was proven.

Archaeology is a different can of worms because there is no way of knowing if they got every thing to gather right because there is no end product.

Or how do they prove that what they call the conclusion is like the real thing.

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Neanderthal DNA turns out to be almost exactly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee

---

This would indicate that the Neanderthal was half man and half monkey which would contradict the idea that man came from the Neanderthal.

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He walked on two feet, made stone implements and weapons including thrusting spears, scrapers, and knives, and was certainly more intelligent than any other creature in his environment prior to the arrival of modern humans

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If he was half man and half monkey as the dna suggests then he could not have been here before man, i think the scientists have gotten so overloaded on information that it has crossed their wires.

I believe Archaeology scientists are a lot like the climate scientists in the sense that they do a lot of assuming due to information that may have been false in the first place and no product to prove them right or wrong.

Personally i believe there were two parts of the creation, the first part on the sixth day God created man and woman.

Gen1:27
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

God rested on the seventh day and it was after that that he made Adam and Eve.

Just my theory.

[Lazamataz]

My thesis is that the Neanderthals died out because their legs were too short.

Since their legs were too short to reach the ground, they never could get traction and run. So there they were, suspended in the air, desperately trying to reach the ground, and failing. Picking them off would be easy.

[wildbill]

Please don’t tell me there is evidence that those neanderthal bastards finally caught Ayla and interbred with her, founding the mutant red-headed, hard-headed Scot DNA.

[Tuanedge]

My personal theory is that Neandertals didn’t mind eating a Cro Magnon now and then, to change their diet. They may be our trolls and hobgoblins of legend.

IIRC scientists agreed that Neandertals didn’t have the vocal cords to produce complex speech patterns... and their frontal lobes weren’t very developed, although the other parts of their brain were quite large. They could probably remember every edible and poisonous plant in the forest, the migration patterns of every animal, and every hunting ground they’d ever visited... but they couldn’t communicate this knowledge to each other, it all relied on personal experience. One Neandertal learned to put a sharp stone on the end of a stick because he’d seen another Neandertal do it... the idea of a bow that could launch a sharp stick was as far beyond them as launching a Saturn V to the moon.

I’m sure Cro Magnons were terrified of them, and after a few humans got eaten, used their communication skills, strategized, and wiped out the Neandertals with superior numbers and superior weapons. Neandertal survivors were probably driven from the prime hunting grounds, and survived only as isolated bands in far forest fastnesses and inaccessible places the Cro-Magnons didn’t want. Just as elderly or starving lions will sometimes turn maneater, isolated Neandertals living on the brink of starvation would have fallen on unsuspecting humans regardless of, and probably unable to conceive the inevitable fact that their depredations would alert humans that Neandertals were in the area, and afterwards result in a coordinated human drive to flush them out and kill them.

Even after the Neandertals were all gone, I’m sure Cro Magnon men told stories of their heroic forbears who had slain the mighty monsters, in a manner similar to the telling of the tale of Beowulf, and that mothers told their children to be good, or the trolls would eat you, and not to go into the forest alone without your father, because Grendel was there.

[null and void]

Judge for yourself whether you think there'd be any possibility of humans and Neanderthals "interbreeding(TM)".....

I never said it would be a "consensual relationship™".

[varmintman]

That gets into another sort of a long story. There seem to be (at least) two basic groups of people on this planet, all of which are genetically near identical but the original cultures and technologies were totally different. In particular the familiar Bible antediluvians were not descended from Cro Magnons; there is a list of a dozen or so things which the Bible and Israelite/Jewish literature would have to know something about for Adam and Eve to have been descended from Cro Magnons, and the Bible and that literature don't know the first thing about any of them.

In particular, people descended from Cro Magnons DO in fact retain racial memories and oral traditions of dealing with hominids and the most obvious case is the Basque "Basajaun". A google image search on that term will turn up any number of images which are roughly ballpark for one of Vendramini's Neanderthals e.g.:

That is as you might anticipate since the Neanderthal made his last European stand in Southern Spain.

[null and void]

Those who believe that the Neanderthals were a different species call them Homo neanderthalensis (no sapiens in the name).

Yep.

Q: If you call a tail a leg how many legs does a dog have?
A: Four.

Calling it a leg does not make it a leg....

[varmintman]

A Neanderthal male would view a woman as an exotic food item and that’s all, none of the primate sex signals would be there. For that matter women scientists have been working around gorillas and chimps in the wild for several decades now and there are no reports of any of them being raped.

[null and void]

In Clan of the Cave Bear she has a Neander-sired son.

Like most crossbreeds he didn’t survive all that long.

[null and void]

Varmintman is NOT a liar.

He firmly believes what he says and posts.

He could still be wrong, but he is decidedly not lying.

[null and void]

OTOH, there are reports of male companions being savaged when they were with a woman who was ovulating.

Chimps are aware of a human woman’s reproductive cycle, and neanderthals being closer to human may get both the ‘eliminate the competition’ reaction the chimps get and the ‘do the deed’ reaction chimps just aren’t close enough to get.

Besides which a surprisingly large number of women don’t report a rape even when the attacker is a member of her own species.