REUTERS/NIKOLA SOLIC
The picture above showcases the typical life of a Neanderthal family in a cave.
Posted on 09/29/2018 12:06:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
REUTERS/NIKOLA SOLIC
The picture above showcases the typical life of a Neanderthal family in a cave.
If someone called you a Neanderthal, you wouldn't take it as a compliment. But according to the latest paleoanthropology, it's not that bad.
In one of my favorite commercial series, Geico features a Neanderthal living in the modern world, constantly getting offended at the way people talk about cavemen like they're stupid. This Pleistocene holdover, you see, is sophisticated, sensitive, more likely to visit a club than to hit you with one.
It's no wonder he had a hard time in the modern world. From the moment their remains were first discovered in Europe and the Middle East over a century-and-a-half ago, Neanderthals have been portrayed as primitive, apelike brutes, dragging their clubs around, and grunting nonsense. Writing at The New York Times several years ago, David Frayer tracked the treatment of these extinct people back to the mid-1800s, when Neanderthals were labeled "freaks" and "idiots," "incapable of moral or religious conception." In fact, the scientific name originally proposed for Neanderthals was Homo stupidus!
But fresh evidence now is rehabilitating Europe's earliest inhabitants and their kin. Last year the New York Times ran a story entitled "Neanderthals Were People, Too," detailing new research that would make Geico's caveman proud.
Turns out Neanderthals were artists who mixed their paints in a subtle rainbow of shades. They produced symbolic images and adorned themselves with feathers and eagle-talon pendants. They could sail surprising distances, they traded, used herbal medicines, and even buried their dead with supplies for the afterlife.
And despite decades of consensus that Neanderthals were incapable of speech, Australian scientists announced in 2013 that fossilized Neanderthal hyoid bones, which anchor the tongue, were indistinguishable from our own.
And now, a new genetic theory is challenging the long-held idea that modern humans, with our superior brain power, drove Neanderthals to extinction. Apparently, many of our ancestors got along quite well with Neanderthals. DNA sequencing suggests that most people alive today are part Neanderthal—an average of 2 percent, and as high as 6 percent in some regions. In fact, an estimated 80 gene sequences around today come directly from Neanderthals.
The mixing of ancient human groups, it seems, was far from rare. A paper published last month in Nature describes how a toe bone from a Siberian cave represents the first confirmed cross between so-called "species" of human. Genome analysis reveals that an adolescent girl to whom the toe bone belonged had a Neanderthal mother and a father who was a member of the Denisovans—another group of ancient humans who left their mark on our DNA.
According to zoologist Ernst Mayer, if two living things can produce fertile offspring, they're members of the same species. And Neanderthals, "modern humans" and Denisovans all produced such offspring. So we're living proof!
Why then, asks the Times, did science get Neanderthals so wrong for so long? Well, a major part of the answer are the evolutionary assumptions that have long clouded our thinking on the origins of mankind. Scientists have long interpreted extinct groups of humans as primitive and apelike. But it seems increasingly difficult to deny that Neanderthals were human; and if human, then created in the image of God. Geico's cosmopolitan caveman wasn't as much of a stretch as we thought.
The lesson of the Neanderthals is that storytelling too frequently masquerades as settled science, and that worldview assumptions often are passed off as hard data. Science got Neanderthals wrong because too few scientists were interested in getting them right. And remember, it wasn't that long ago that entire groups of humans were portrayed as primitive and apelike because of similar Darwinian assumptions.
Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.
“basque people and the possibility they have a plethora of Neanderthal genes...”
The majority of my ancestors were Spanish Basques from the Pyrenees-typical Basque rebels, they got the hell out of Dodge-came to the New World in the mid 16th and early 17th centuries-so that subject is of particular interest to me and several other family members-I’m one of the redheads with green/gray eyes in the family-red hair and light eyes are believed by some in the scientific community to have been common among Neanderthals. Some of us would gladly do the DNA tracking if there were a way to keep it out of places where it could be used in a bad way-places like 23 and Me, Ancestry.com etc...
"Preferences" are something you can talk about.
Animals don't have "preferences" - they can't say what they would prefer.
Animals of the same sex, though, do sometimes have sex, or something like it.
It would be foolish to call animals gay or homosexual, but behavior of that sort has been seen in animals, even in the wild.
I see what you did there.
Neanderthal genes seem to be correlated with higher, not lower intelligence, which suggests that they were mostly Republican. They also hunted and ate red meat, which clinches the deal.
The author points to a time when understanding religion was a requirement for being a superior being.
That made me chuckle. Being able to “understand” what a group of old wise men want you to believe is pretty much the definition of a stupid mind.
Like I indicated, as in captivity with the lack of an opposite sex, animals can freak out with each other (as Big Joe from Kelly’s Heroes would put it). But will they do that in the wild with the opposite sex present? Not that I’ve heard. Homosexuality is an aberration at best, no more intended by nature or evolution than are mutations. And like a mutation, has no purpose, and is with very rare exception harmful.
Sasquatch is a human also, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her.
Wow — looks like Hubs’ side of the family.
Look up bonobo chimpanzees.
I was disappointed when I recently learned that the Basque settlers’ yodeling in “Thunder in the Sun” was not a form of actual communication complete with town names, directions, etc. Oh, well.
But is it true that most of Spain’s small arms industry is located in the Basque country? Many Spanish pistols & shotguns have distinctly Basque tradenames; I own several.
*ping*
Maimonides (1135-1204 A.D.) says in “A Guide for the Perplexed” that before Adam and Eve a race of beings virtually indistinguishable from humans existed. The Jews called them “the people of the field.” What made them less than human, Maimonides said, was that they had no soul. When God breathed a soul into Adam and Eve they became the first true humans.
Thanks fmdj. It's interesting to see some foot-dragging has come to an end, but it's really just some more saddling on something, then projecting behavior onto someone else. it's just a matter of some money to test one's own DNA and compare it with archaic DNA. Most living people show some percentage came from Neandertal.
I’ve never researched that-my family name is one of the common Spanish Basque ones starting with “Z”-and it has been my observation the the legacy of Rome survives in our Latin tempers-that and a genetic predisposition to being an unrepentant rebel and authority fighter-Basques don’t seem to be happy with any government...
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