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That is incorrect, and your Discovery Magazine source article is now 17 years out of date -- 17 years in science these days is a long time.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:
- "The most vocal proponent of the hybridization hypothesis is Erik Trinkaus of Washington University.[84]
Trinkaus claims various fossils as hybrid individuals, including the "child of Lagar Velho", a skeleton found at Lagar Velho in Portugal dated to about 24,000 years ago.[85]
In a 2006 publication co-authored by Trinkaus, the fossils found in 1952 in the cave of Peștera Muierii, Romania, are likewise claimed as hybrids.[86]
Genetic analysis:
- "Genetic research has confirmed that some admixture took place.[87]
The genomes of all non-Africans include portions that are of Neanderthal origin,[88][89] due to interbreeding between Neanderthals and the ancestors of Eurasians in Northern Africa or the Middle East prior to their spread.
Rather than absorption of the Neanderthal population, this gene flow appears to have been of limited duration and limited extent.
An estimated 1 to 4 percent of the DNA in Europeans and Asians (French, Chinese and Papua probands) is non-modern, and shared with ancient Neanderthal DNA rather than with Sub-Saharan Africans (Yoruba and San probands).[90]
Nonetheless, more recent genetic studies seem to suggest that modern humans may have mated with "at least two groups" of ancient humans: Neanderthals and Denisovans.[91"
Genetic analysis:
- "Genetic evidence published in 2010 suggests they contributed DNA to anatomically modern humans, probably through interbreeding between Neanderthals and the earliest Humans that dispersed out of Africa.
This is thought to have occurred between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, shortly after (or perhaps before) the proto-Eurasians emigrated from Africa, while they were still one population.
"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:
- "Humans and Neanderthals have a common ancestor who lived in Africa about 500,000 years ago.
Some of these guys clearly went off and evolved into Neanderthals.
"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?
- "Anatomically modern humans first emerged in East Africa, some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
An exodus from Africa over the Arabian Peninsula around 60,000 years ago brought modern humans to Eurasia..."
"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:
- "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 15,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change...
"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:
;-)