"I'll have the roast duck, with the mango salsa."
Posted on 02/25/2006 5:11:22 AM PST by ThreePuttinDude
LONDON — Neanderthals in Europe were killed off by the advance of modern humans thousands of years earlier than previously believed, losing a competition for food and shelter, according to a scientific study published Wednesday.
The research uses advances in radiocarbon dating to revise understanding of early humans, suggesting they colonized Europe more rapidly and coexisted for a much shorter period with genetic ancestors.
Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge and author of the study, said Neanderthals — the species of the Homo genus that lived in Europe and western Asia from around 230,000 years ago to around 29,000 years ago — succumbed much more readily to competition.
"The two sides were competing for the same territories, the same animals and fuel supplies and occupying the same cave spaces. With that kind of competition, the Neanderthals were always going to come out as the losers," said Mellars, whose paper was published in the journal Nature.
Modern humans — those anatomically the same as people today — were also better equipped to deal with a 6 degree Celsius (11 Fahrenheit) fall in temperatures around 40,000 years ago.
"Because they had better clothing, better technology(??) and a better mastery of fire, the humans were equipped to deal with it," Mellars said.
Mellars used the results of two recent studies of radiocarbon dating — a process of assessing age by counting radioactive decay of carbon in materials — to refine dates determined from fossils, bone fragments and other physical evidence that relates to the spread of humans.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I don't know. Maybe the human tribes did not hold the Neanderthal women because they were just too butt ugly to look at every day. Or maybe they just didn't feel like sharing their food with them. My guess is because there's no reason to bring the (butt ugly) cow home when you can get the milk for free. But whatever the answer, the fact remains that we do not find mixed communities in the archeaological record.
PS. And it probably wouldn't be all that great having an unintelligible butt ugly cow around bites and kicks and bashes your head in with a stone when you fall asleep.
A small population may have survived into the late 19th century, according to Ivan T. Sanderson, writer of a book (published back in the 60's or early 70's, I think) Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life.
It details stories of the capture of a "wild woman" in a frontier area somewhere around the Ural Mountains, that she was kept and "used", giving birth to halfbreed offspring which did not survive when she took them down to the icy creek to wash them after birth.
Sanderson has a ton of stories of human-like creatures; credible or not, the book is an interesting read. I think I'll check it out a my library again, it's been at least ten years since I've seen it.
But DNA exclsusion is. That's what I was referring to.
My point all along is that of the myriad of reasons to put out against the possibility of ANY interbreeding, the cultural one is the weakest and it is quite reasonable that the reasons were much greater.
Again, if talking about humans, it would be expected that women would get swapped both ways. Certain conjecture and facts concerning Neanderthals could be put forth to assert that this was only one way. Yet you then have to explain what became of the mixed children of the captured Neanderthal women, none of which could have mixed back into the population, if DNA evidence is conclusive.
So I'm going with the idea that a more pronounced difference precluded initial and/or subsequent carrying of the mixed line.
Never mind this technical folderol. The NFL needs more Neandertals, not to mention the NHL. Ya see the arms on that guy? Wouldn't want him to head-butt me., neither.
I think the insurmountable problem for a C-M/N hybrid was not surviving infancy but surviving the mating game later.
Presuming the C-M folks even knew that sex has consequences, they would probably not have been kind to the hybrid. A hybrid girl would have had the better odds, but even she would have faced horrendous odds at trying to keep HER baby alive. That's if she even reached sexual maturity before succumbing to the abuse she'd get. In other words, sex she'd get, regardless how ugly she was, and food she'd get, and protection from adults up to a point. But eventually the elders can't protect her and her contemporaries are dangerous---and her baby is not worth the resources nor under any one male's protection.
Add to ugliness a lack of eloquence, and her odds drop even lower. Speech was probably a big status symbol in those days.
(It still is, but you guys just don't want to believe it.)
Absolutely concur. And it just might be that simple.
Also my point (not to you) earlier about growth rate might apply. Who wants a 150 pound two year old in their house, who is trying to breed with every woman that walks by?
Neandertal was too small for the NFL; we're talking Bigfoot, Sasquatch, etc. Imagine an eight foot tall, nine hundred pound nose tackle!
My point was that human social norms would dictate that you would find this, but we don't, so what gives? To me the lack of this evidence shows that it didn't happen. The fact that it does happen with human bands, but not in this case is indicative that there was something stronger than normal social exclusion at work.
To answer your issue about wife-swapping humans: They can talk to one another. A comparable analogy here would have to be wife-swapping all the way out of the language group. That simply does not happen willingly in pre-urban societies. Heck, it's almost unheard of even as an unwilling transaction. As I said, it is so extraordinarily rare it borders on nonexistent.
And it barely happens willingly even in ancient post-urban cultures.
And you are also of course ignoring the difficulty that subsistence cultures have in keeping the group fed and alive. Why on earth they would want to pull a Neanderthal woman into the group is a mystery to me.
YOu know, if anyone can prove they are Neandertal they could get Reparations, build Casinos, etc. etc. etc. ;)
Or star in Geico commercials ;)
"I'll have the roast duck, with the mango salsa."
Yeah, it's definitely worth noting that Neanderthal females were burly critters too. In a one on one situation I think the Cro-Magnon guy would have to worry about getting raped more than the Neanderthal female.
Thanks for the tip! I'll read that book. The only sci fi I enjoy is the kind that claims it isn't.
Please nobody pile on me because I can't stand normal sci fi. It's genetic and I can't help it.
Stone-age American Indians did this all the time. If 1000 Swedish women were dropped into a primitive tribal area, their DNA lines would not be lost. Simply put, I am saying that humans must have avoided interbreeding with Neanderthals for reasons that are much stronger than human-human activity indicates, or we would have some DNA trace of them. I'm not counting being furry, violently anti-social (like a wild animal), or such as "normal social exclusion". If you are, then we've reached a conclusion of our discussion.
What if the 1000 Swedish women were butt ugly, vicious, and more muscle-bound than the Stone Age Indian guys? What do you think would happen then?
Gotta go. If you have information on the issue of arrested development or lack thereof in Neanderthals I'd love to hear it. I'll check in tomorrow.
Thanks for the correction on the Neanderthal's range. I like to trade ideas, but I hate to give out bad information as fact, even when its an honest mistake.
SampleMan, or anybody else, can you answer this?
The conclusion that we are not related to Neandertals, is it based solely on mtDNA research or has there been another sort of genetic evidence? Because I don't see how mtDNA alone could prove it.
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