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'll take your word for it, because I've not looked directly at that question, just at tangential questions. I'm curious though to look into it further, so I will keep that in mind for whenever I have the chance!
Try it here
TWO Everyone after that would have the DNA from only three women
THREE prior to the flood people lived for hundreds of years and their skulls would have continued to grow.
FOUR after the flood people no longer lived for hundreds of years.
You are aware that only the last of these four stands up to scientific scrutiny (and that only if you omit reference to the flood)?
Through advances in DNA technology, paleoanthropologists have been able to extract genetic material from some of the Neanderthal bones and compare their genes with those of modern humans. The modern genes, Klein argues, "derive exclusively" from the African ancestors of modern humans, and not from Neanderthals.
That's a highly contentious point. Other anthropologists, such as Erik Trinkaus of the University of Pennsylvania and Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, contend that many modern humans carry at least some genes of Neanderthals mixed in with their own.
Three years ago, Trinkaus and a team of Portuguese scientists described the skeleton of a young boy found in a shallow grave more than 25,000 years old and said they determined from his bones that the youngster was at least part Neanderthal.
In interviews last week, both Trinkaus and Wolpoff argued that this was clear evidence that Neanderthals and modern human ancestors not only lived side by side but also mated and interbred. "The so-called modern humans are a 50-50 combination of ancestry from both peoples," Wolpoff says. "In many Europeans today, you can clearly see the physical features of a Neanderthal past."
To Trinkaus, Klein's conclusions "overemphasize and distort the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans, while downplaying the similarities. The Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons interbred and produced offspring." From here.
Is that where cavemen buy toys?
Well, that explains my boss.
And, to be sure, I do think it's an excellent point. The basic scenario being that a Neanderthal rapes a Cro-Magnon, who returns to the cave and later bears the child, and raises the child not realizing it's a hybrid, having made no connection between the rape and the child.
I very indirectly addressed this in two ways. Above, where I mention that in order for the Neanderthal genes to persist we must assume that the human community survives, the point I was getting at is how did the Neanderthal rape the human woman in the first place? In general, the community would seek to protect its females and if Neanderthals were wont to rape human females to begin with (a questionable proposition in my view) then that's all the more reason for them to be protected by the community.
Secondly, the hybrid would presumably look deformed, and we know that most premodern cultures practiced infanticide of deformed infants.
So, we have two big hurdles, even without the cognitive connection: (A) the Cro-Magnon woman has to be unprotected and thus subject to rape by Neanderthal; and (B) the presumably deformed child has to not be killed. And actually, we have a third hurdle: (C) Neanderthal males have to want to rape human females.
And of course we know nothing at all about Neanderthal sexual behavior, and never will. The whole notion of sex with a human female might've been unthinkable to them.
I am not saying that it never happened not once even a single time (although it's certainly possible in my view) but if it did happen it must've been exceptionally rare and ultimately inconsequential to the gene pool, IMHO.
Have a joy filled day!
DOH
Well, the rest of the article is certainly worth reading for context, especially this part:
SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES
In fact, Klein contends, DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones shows that the last shared ancestors of the Neanderthals and modern humans lived in Africa at least 500,000 to 600,000 years ago.
There are other major differences, too: Cro-Magnons were the first to produce arrowlike projectiles tipped with ivory and amber, while Neanderthal weapons were only wooden spears sometimes tipped with stone points, Klein says.
The Cro-Magnons also made figurines and created objects of bone, an ability the Neanderthals apparently largely lacked, he says.
As the Cro-Magnon people became more advanced, they learned to build the first true houses, Klein says. By contrast, archaeologists have found only one example where a Neanderthal may have constructed a crude house -- perhaps merely by imitating a Cro-Magnon dwelling, he says.
Except for that one Neanderthal house at a site in central France, "there is little to suggest that Neanderthals could behave in a modern, Upper Paleolithic way," Klein says, referring to the period in which Cro-Magnons thrived. That may well explain why Neanderthals disappeared so quickly and completely, he says.
Then there is the question of language: A recently discovered human gene, called FOXP2, is involved in the human ability to use speech and language. Chimpanzees -- humans' closest animal relatives -- don't carry that gene, but Cro-Magnons may have.
GENES' UNANSWERED QUESTION
Although Wolpoff insists that the bone structure of Neanderthal fossils indicates they too could have been capable of voicing sounds, whether or not they did would become clear only if the FOXP2 gene is ever found in a sample of DNA remaining inside a scrap of Neanderthal bone.
"The main question that remains open," Klein says, "is whether Neanderthal genes explain their failure to compete culturally."
Klein has at least one major ally in F. Clark Howell of UC Berkeley, an eminent paleoanthropologist who has traced human evolution from its beginnings 7 million years ago to the relatively recent rise of the Cro-Magnons and the swift extinction of the Neanderthals.
"I couldn't find a single word in Klein's paper that I could disagree with, " Howell says. "It's a superb piece of work. He's summed it all up with the strongest possible evidence -- both for the known and what's still unknown."
Even bombs jacketed with Cobalt Thorium G with a radioactive half-life of 93 years ... ?
The part of the paper that had rehashed what seems to be accepted knowledge--I left out since it was already (in one form or another) mentioned. For me, the key was the evidence of the mixed fossil boy found in Iberia and Wolpoff's comments.
However, these results do not definitively resolve the question of a possible Neandertal contribution to the gene pool of modern humans since such a contribution might have been erased by genetic drift or by the continuous influx of modern human DNA into the Neandertal gene pool.
Let's say for the sake of discussion that some alien invaders from Galaxy X were studying us and scratching their heads saying "Surely the humans and chimps interbreed. Look at how similar they are." I realize this is a far stretch, but imagine looking at humans and chimps for the first time and thinking they must be pretty closely related, and possibly even interbreed. Just like SampleMan (I think) made the analogy of the fox and the dog. And the offspring of horse and a donkey is unable to reproduce.
My personal theory is that there was no interbreeding, more along the lines of the horse/donkey scenario, otherwise as homo sapiens became more abundant on the Neanderthal turf, interbreeding would have become more prolific. This would have given the Neanderthals more human-like qualities thereby increasing their chance of survival, or would mean that eventually Neanderthal and homo sapien would merge into one species.
Certainly I'm not as well read on this subject as some of you brainiacs, but have always found it fascinating and wanted to chime in! :-)
You don't seem to have an open mind.
You seem to be a member of the religion of atheism.
With this blindness you judge all things
Do not ping me, if you don't want to hear my point of view.
Underneath the mammoth that collapsed on him! Oh, wouldn't that be the find of the millenium!
LOL! Of course that does not definitively resolve the question, or else we wouldn't be having this debate. As I said earlier, it is "powerful" evidence against, but not definitive.
Look, this is my final answer to this debate! It's OK with me if people want to fantasize hot cave sex between Cro-Magnons and Neandertals. It really is. I think it flies in the face of not just genetic research but of human sociology as well. But if someone wants to think it happened that is OK by me.
Ahem...
American Indian tribes continually warred against their neighbors, took slaves and interbred with them. That's intermixing, of genes anyway.
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