The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, the researchers added.
Posted on 10/05/2012 12:48:49 PM PDT by Sopater
Neanderthals apparently last interbred with the ancestors of today's Europeans after modern humans with advanced stone tools expanded out of Africa, researchers say. The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, the researchers added.
Modern humans once shared the globe with now-departed human lineages, including the Neanderthals, our closest known extinct relatives. Neanderthals had been around for about 30,000 years when modern humans appeared in the fossil record about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 year ago.
In 2010, scientists completed the first sequence of the Neanderthal genome using DNA extracted from fossils, and an examination of the genetic material suggested that modern humans' ancestors occasionally successfully interbred with Neanderthals. Recent estimates reveal that Neanderthal DNA makes up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes, perhaps endowing some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Nor I, and my wife is trying to sleep.
Because Laz wouldn’t hit it.
So, that explains the neighbors.
The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, the researchers added.
The "scientific consensus" is pretty clear:
That is the "scientific consensus".
People who do not agree with the basics of it are not real scientists.
Thanks BroJoeK, well said.
Guess those knuckles DO get in the way - specially on those damn small i-phones designed for puny little sapiens fingers!!
:)
Did Humans Breed With Neanderthals? A New Study Says No
http://www.rttnews.com/1947576/did-humans-breed-with-neanderthals-a-new-study-says-no.aspx
If you dont like that url just Google the search terms “Study says Neanderthals never bred with humans”
What these new studies propose is an alternative hypothesis to more recent human/Neanderthal interbreeding.
They suggest that instead of interbreeding circa 30,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals share common ancestors in North Africa around 500,000 years ago.
I think that's a fine explanation, and may well be true, but so far have seen no evidence to prove for certain which competing hypothesis deserves the moniker of "theory".
What I find funny is the logical fallacy the General Theory believers use to make their argument for Macro evolution here.
A logical fallacy is a collapse in logic often used in debate to mislead or distract people from the real issue.
Here we see both “Begging the Question: logical fallacy in action (also called Petitio Principii, this term is sometimes used interchangeably with Circular Reasoning): If writers assume as evidence for their argument the very conclusion they are attempting to prove, they engage in the fallacy of begging the question. The most common form of this fallacy is when the first claim is initially loaded with the very conclusion one has yet to prove.
And the “False Cause” Logical fallacy : This fallacy establishes a cause/effect relationship that does not exist. There are various Latin names for various analyses of the fallacy. The two most common include these types:
(1) Non Causa Pro Causa (Literally, “Not the cause for a cause”): A general, catch-all category for mistaking a false cause of an event for the real cause.
(2) Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc (Literally: “After this, therefore because of this”): This type of false cause occurs when the writer mistakenly assumes that, because the first event preceded the second event, it must mean the first event caused the later one.
There is zero actual archaeological evidence on the planet of humans cross-breeding with Neanderthal, e.g.
http://discovermagazine.com/1995/sep/theneanderthalpe558/
“Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people—but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.
Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.”
Shreve mentions that humans and Neanderthals may have occupied the Levant at different time periods (thus dealing with the lack of evidence of cross-breeding) but I believe that Vendramini’s more recent study eliminates that possibility pretty thoroughly.
Next is the fact of the first modern humans appearing suddenly in the archaeological record:
Vendramini (”Them and us”) notes:
“The speed of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution in the Levant was also breathtaking. Anthropologists Ofer Bar-Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch:
Between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago the material culture of western Eurasia changed more than it had during the previous million years. This efflorescence of technological and artistic creativity signifies the emergence of the first culture that observers today would recognise as distinctly human, marked as it was by unceasing invention and variety. During that brief period of 5,000 or so years, the stone tool kit, unchanged in its essential form for ages, suddenly began to differentiate wildly from century to century and from region to region. Why it happened and why it happened when it did constitute two of the greatest outstanding problems in paleoanthropology.”
Likewise Dwardu Cardona (”Flare Star”):
“Where and how the Cro Magnons first arose remains unknown. Their appearance, however, coincided with the most bitter phase of the ice age. There is, however, no doubt that they were more advanced, more sophisticated, than the Neanderthals with whom they shared the land. Living in larger and more organized groups than had earlier humans, Cro Magnon peoples spread out until they populated most of the world. Their tools, made of bone, stone, and even wood, were carved into harpoons, awls, and fish hooks. They were presumably able hunters although, as with the Neanderthals, they would also have foraged to gather edible plants, roots, and wild vegetables. The only problem here is that, as far as can be told, the Cro Magnons seem to have arrived on the scene without leaving a single trace of their evolutionary ancestors. ‘When the first Cro Magnons arrived in Europe some 40,000 years ago’, Ian Tattersall observed, ‘they evidently brought with them more or less the entire panoply of behaviors that distinguishes modern humans from every other species that has ever existed.’”
We read a claim that we and the Neanderthal have a “common ancestor(TM)”. The Neanderthal has been abandoned as a plausible evolutionary antecedent for modern man precisely because the genetic gap is too large (DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee). Anything 300K - 500K years back which anybody could try to claim was a “common ancestor(TM)” to both us and the Neanderthal (Usually given as homo Heidelbergensis)”, would be much more remote from us THAN the Neanderthal. Too-genetically-remote-to-be-ancestral-to is a transitive relationship and the nature of such relationships doesn’t require graduate level math; you’d think the people making this particular claim would figure the problem out sooner or later but they don’t seem to.
There is a new claim (Paabo and the Max Planck Institute) of 1 - 4% Neanderthal genes in everybody other than Africans. That one is at odds with the undisputed knowledge of a recent severe population bottleneck (probably < 100 individuals on the planet) amongst modern humans. As Vendramini’s reconstructions show, the Neanderthal was a glorified ape. Any crossbreeding with a glorified ape PRIOR to the bottleneck and Africans would not get left out. Any crossing AFTER the bottleneck and not involving Africans as claimed, and the genetic gap between Africans and everyody else would be gigantic, rather than minuscule as it actually is. Paabo and others making this claim need to go back to school for some sort of a basic logic course.
Not that the genetic evidence Paabo cites is fictitious mind you, just that it does not indicate actual cross breeding. What it does indicate is the existence of a few low-level genetic components in different creatures. Similarly, you’d find a few of the same low-level C language math functions in both banking software and rocket telemetry programs. That does not mean that rocket control software is hacked from banking software.
Further, it does not help the General Theory adherents here either when the Human DNA mutation rate is as slow as it is. http://www.nature.com/news/studies-slow-the-human-dna-clock-1.11431
“Geneticists have previously estimated mutation rates by comparing the human genome with the sequences of other primates. On the basis of species-divergence dates gleaned — ironically — from fossil evidence, they concluded that in human DNA, each letter mutates once every billion years.”
Sorry, but the argument Humans bred with Neanderthals is based on unsupported logical fallacies.
Someone else’s 1st grader made it under the influence of “BIZARRO” comics and the left bank.
"You mean like Democrats?"
They haven’t sampled everyone.
I always thought my late husband had more than 4% Neanderthal. He was a clear blue-eyed red head with pink skin and lots of body hair, heavy brow ridges, weak chin which a beard covered up, heavy bones; massive upper body strength and short legs, and volatile temper. He was mostly Scots ancestry with a 1/16 Cree indian mixed in. One of our sons also has the large strong body, and had 6 wisdom teeth that had to be pulled. He was asked if he had any Esquimo blood. The Crees are a Canadian indian tribe.
The population bottleneck you refer to was probably 5,000 to 10,000, not 100.
I don’t think that Malinche was an Aztec princess. If I remember correctly she was from a victimized tribe, probably the Tlaxcallans who marched at least 100,000 strong with Cortez and his less than 200 men to conquer Tenochtitlan. They were tired of being eaten by the Aztecs.
I’ll try to find a reference. In the Naked archeologist, there were a bunch of Israeli Rabbis (what do you call a group of Rabbis? A Flock? LOL) and they said the original translation meant that which was very old (which is referenced in the verse “mighty men of old”.
They mentioned that men of old were thought to be Titans, like the Greek Titans, and that is were the idea of giants came in.
If you do a simple word search on this thread (cntrl F, type the word "macro"), you'll see that the only poster using the term "Macro evolution" is you.
That term, "Macro evolution" is only an issue for anti-evolutionists.
Mechanicos: "A logical fallacy is a collapse in logic often used in debate to mislead or distract people from the real issue."
I also remember basics from my Philosophy 101 (logic) class.
But if I ever feel the need to brush-up on the subject, I'll know how to contact you, FRiend.
Mechanicos: "There is zero actual archaeological evidence on the planet of humans cross-breeding with Neanderthal, e.g."
That is incorrect, and your Discovery Magazine source article is now 17 years out of date -- 17 years in science these days is a long time.
Today there is both physical evidence -- for another example of which I again refer to SunkenCiv's post #78 -- and DNA analysis:
Physical evidence:
Genetic analysis:
Genetic analysis:
"According to the study as much as 1–4% of the genome of the population that populated Eurasia was contributed by Neanderthals."
But a 2012 study suggests an alternative hypothesis:
"But of the rest that evolved into modern humans, some must have been more closely related to Neanderthals than others...
When modern humans finally left Africa and moved to Europe, it was the group more closely related to Neanderthals that made the journey.
By contrast, the modern humans less strongly related to Neanderthals stayed behind, hence the genetic difference we see today. "
Mechanicos quoting 1995 article: "When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other.
If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth."
In fact, there are some "Neanderthal traits" found in some modern humans -- and not only in us "knuckle dragging males". ;-)
I refer you again to SunkenCiv's post #78.
Mechanicos quoting 1995 article: "From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant."
There is physical, paleontological and DNA evidence suggesting interbreeding and/or common ancestors between some Neanderthals and some humans.
Mechanicos quoting Dwardu Cardona:"Where and how the Cro Magnons first arose remains unknown...
There is, however, no doubt that they were more advanced, more sophisticated, than the Neanderthals with whom they shared the land."
When did Early Modern Humans first arise?
"Current scientific literature prefers the term European Early Modern Humans (EEMH), to the term 'Cro-Magnon' which has no formal taxonomic status, as it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture.[1]
The earliest known remains of Cro-Magnon-like humans are radiocarbon dated to 43,000 years before present.[2]"
Nechanicos quoting Dwardu Cardona: "...Cro Magnons seem to have arrived on the scene without leaving a single trace of their evolutionary ancestors."
Not true. There is physical evidence of early modern humans going back nearly 200,000 years.
The earliest of these was no more advanced technologically than Neanderthals.
Mechanicos quoting Dwardu Cardona: "The Neanderthal has been abandoned as a plausible evolutionary antecedent for modern man precisely because the genetic gap is too large (DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee)."
Complete rubbish.
On a scale of one to 20, where modern humans are one and chimpanzees 20, Neanderthals are around 2 (.3% alleles versus 6% for chimpanzees).
Mechanicos quoting Dwardu Cardona: "Anything 300K - 500K years back which anybody could try to claim was a “common ancestor(TM)” to both us and the Neanderthal (Usually given as homo Heidelbergensis)”, would be much more remote from us THAN the Neanderthal.
Too-genetically-remote-to-be-ancestral-to is a transitive relationship..."
And Mechanicos preaches about "logical fallacies"??
In the overall scheme of Life-on-Earth -- circa one billion years -- ancestries of merely 500,000 years ago are very close relationships indeed -- not necessarily long enough even to define a new scientific "species".
This is reflected in recent DNA studies suggesting modern humans and Neanderthals are separated by only .3% (not 3%) of base-pair alleles.
And that is actually fewer than the number of DNA mutations separating some modern humans (.4%) from others!
So the fact of human/Neanderthal close relationship is indisputable -- the question is how did it happen, through common ancestry, or more recent interbreeding or both?
Mechanicos quoting Dwardu Cardona: "There is a new claim (Paabo and the Max Planck Institute) of 1 - 4% Neanderthal genes in everybody other than Africans.
That one is at odds with the undisputed knowledge of a recent severe population bottleneck (probably < 100 individuals on the planet) amongst modern humans."
Utter nonsense. Here is the reality:
"Research on many genes finds different coalescence points from 2 million years ago to 60,000 years ago when different genes are considered, thus disproving the existence of more recent extreme bottlenecks (i.e., a single breeding pair).[3][6]
"On the other hand, in 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[7]
"This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.[8]"
Mechanicos quoting Dwardu Cardona: "As Vendramini’s reconstructions show, the Neanderthal was a glorified ape."
Vendramini is obviously a blithering froth-at-the-mouth knuckle-dragging pre-human ape.
Mechanicos quoting Nature article: "On the basis of species-divergence dates gleaned — ironically — from fossil evidence, they concluded that in human DNA, each letter mutates once every billion years."
Nothing "ironic" about it.
The issues here include exactly which mutations do they count, how do they count them, and how variable are natural mutation rates?
For example: might some species -- small in numbers, reproducing rapidly and under great environmental stresses (i.e. predators, climate change, etc.) -- experience more rapid rates of DNA mutation than others larger, more slowly reproducing in friendlier environments?
Indeed, your linked article itself points out that more recent DNA mutation rate estimates do help solve some mysteries, while also raising new questions.
Seems to me that's just what real science is all about, and makes it interesting for the rest of us to follow.
Mechanicos: "Sorry, but the argument Humans bred with Neanderthals is based on unsupported logical fallacies."
Sorry, but your arguments above are based first on outdated, debunked "science" and second on some strange ideological agenda.
As such, they represents the very definition of "logical fallacies".
By the way, to prove my case that Vendramini is a knuckle-dragging ape, here is a recent self portrait of him:
;-)
Neanderthals were just another race of humans. I'm sure there were Neanderthal girls who were better looking than what modern men walk out of bars with at closing time.
You posted a lot of stuff but never recovered from the fact that the entire argument here is a logical fallacy. Nothing you posted PROVED they cross-breaded, just more logical fallacies, assumptions and theories. We share DNA with bananas too - does not mean we bred with them. This argument is like saying because a Chevette and a Cadillac share some of the same components that the Cadillac evolved from the Chevette.
Posting other logical fallacy arguments from other people does not fix the fatal logic flaw of the original issue. It just shows there is dishonesty in some people seeking grant money.
First of all, there is no "logical fallacy" -- zero, zip, nada -- in reporting what some scientific researchers hypothesize.
Second, here you've made a gaudy display of knowing basics of "logical fallacies", but you obviously know nothing about science.
In science, nothing outside a mathematical theorem is ever formally "PROVED".
Instead, scientists make confirmed observations ("facts") help form hypothetical explanations, which are used to design experiments and predictions that can falsify or confirm the hypothesis.
A confirmed hypothesis is called a "theory".
So basic evolution ( = descent with modifications plus natural selection) is a many-times confirmed hypothesis, making it a scientific theory, and in some opinions also a confirmed observation, which would make it a fact.
By contrast, speculations on possible human/Neanderthal interbreeding are considered hypotheses, albeit recently supported by very sophisticated DNA analyses plus observations of similar ancient and modern physical characteristics.
Of course you or anyone else are free to accept or reject these hypotheses, for whatever reasons.
And you can be certain that, over time, many other scientists will attempt to duplicate the most recent work and they may or may not arrive at similar conclusions.
Indeed, that's the essence of what science is and does.
It's what makes science so interesting and exciting for those with a scientific mind-set.
Of course, other people absolutely hate it -- the very idea (!) that some scientist somewhere could perform some experiment and instantly prove that whatever you previously believed is now wrong just upsets them to no end, they can't abide it!
They won't accept it!
To *ell with science, if it disagrees with my beliefs! ;-)
But I love it, and it bothers me not at all if every hypothesis cannot eventually be confirmed as theory, and if every theory cannot be observed as fact.
What's so exciting to me is how much more is understood today than when I first learned science in grade-school.
Machanicos: "Posting other logical fallacy arguments from other people does not fix the fatal logic flaw of the original issue.
It just shows there is dishonesty in some people seeking grant money."
All of the dishonesty I've seen on these threads comes from anti-evolutionists.
Nearly all refuse to confess the simple truth of the matter, which is that they deny certain scientific theories, hypotheses and even facts because those don't conform to their unique interpretations of Biblical texts.
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