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 ...
This sounds like the makings of a great PC Game
"Mods vs Neanderthals"
"What if the 1000 Swedish women were butt ugly"......You couldn't find 1,000 butt ugly Swedish women!!!
You can't use mtDNA to prove you're related to your father. Mungo Man, a "modern" human, also has an extinct mtDNA line.
mtDNA is better evidence when it shows something positively than when it fails to show something.
Unfortunately, I've really tied myself up in knots because of not being clear between consensual and non-consensual interbreeding!
Well, after I posed the question, I then noticed that you had about another 20 posts on the topic. :) Is it not possible however that a few Cro Magnon women raised mixed offspring, maybe as a curiosity, or out of the maternal instinct, or whatever, and the issue of the mixed offspring kept breeding with Cro Magnons, so the Neanderthal genes got diluted down to infinitesimal levels. That scenario of possibly some Neanderthal genetic material being in humans is the most likely to resist being swept away by the gathering genetic evidence, is it not?
Here's the abstract:
The process by which the Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans between 42,000 and 30,000 before present is still intriguing. Although no Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineage is found to date among several thousands of Europeans and in seven early modern Europeans, interbreeding rates as high as 25% could not be excluded between the two subspecies. In this study, we introduce a realistic model of the range expansion of early modern humans into Europe, and of their competition and potential admixture with local Neanderthals. Under this scenario, which explicitly models the dynamics of Neanderthals' replacement, we estimate that maximum interbreeding rates between the two populations should have been smaller than 0.1%. We indeed show that the absence of Neanderthal mtDNA sequences in Europe is compatible with at most 120 admixture events between the two populations despite a likely cohabitation time of more than 12,000 y. This extremely low number strongly suggests an almost complete sterility between Neanderthal females and modern human males, implying that the two populations were probably distinct biological species.
The full analysis is at the link.
And above, I do state that it may very well have happened on rare occasion, just not in such a way as to be of any consequence. I do not pretend any of my comments are 100% type comments. But the assimilation hypothesis is not a 'once-in-a-blue-moon' scenario. The basic premise of the assimilation hypothesis is that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon intermixed to such an extent that Neanderthals were subsumed into the Cro-Magnon population.
So what does it prove when you can't find a match? Do you know what matrilineal means? You can only get it from your mother, who got it from her mother.
Nuclear genes can migrate through a population along both male and female lines. Nuclear genomes recombine. Half of your nuclear genes came from a person other than your mother. None of your mitochondrial genes did.
Apparently, by your own logic, you're not related to your father. Please do not go get another mtDNA study--there are others--and wave the conclusion around as you just did with Sykes. Let's not play dumb here.
Agree.
Sloping foreheads and receding chins are very common among Europeans. I also see those elongated skulls and many males with serious brow ridges.
I think ruling out interbreeding is simply a matter of arrogance.
No, what modern humans tend to do is kill off the guys and have sex with the women.
I've also wondered how evolutionists cannot be racists. After all, Australian Aborigines, for example, very well could be less evolved versions of those fully-human. Where are the less-evolved forms of humans or new-humans? Is it right or wrong to see them as deserving of less rights than those fully human?
It seems very problematic, morally-speaking, to believe in evolution. Seems like an evolutionist wouldn't be able to challenge Hitler's (and Nietchze's) superman....
Strawman 1: eating meat. Humans have several million years of hunting in their past. What did you think they were eating? (Homo erectus word for "bad hunter" -- vegetarian).
Strawman 2: Australian Aborigines. They are fully human, and it is rude of you to suggest that "evolutionists" would think otherwise. I have met a few and they were all pretty nice folks. You could learn a lot from them.
Strawman 3: where are the less-evolved forms. Extinct.
Strawman 4: where are the new-humans. Nonsensical question. They are us. Look at the changes in teeth (potential loss of the third molars) that may now be underway.
Strawman 5: favoring Hitler's superman. Now you're getting insulting. Why don't you just call us Nazis and be done with it?
From your post you appear to be an anti-evolutionist searching for any way to attack the theory of evolution, most likely because it does not agree with your religious belief.
In the future you might try to stick to what the theory of evolution actually states, rather than making up silly objections.
Unfortunately, I've been having a real difficult time thinking clearly throughout this debate, because I'm having a major allergy attack. That usually means my face swells up to the point where I feel tipsy. My sloppy writing and many typos are a good clue of that!
In my opinion disease is not only possible, but probable. The time line seems to work better for disease than for warfare. There's not a lot of evidence I'm aware of for pre-agricultural warfare, although I could be out of date.
All right then. Protected, how? How exactly does one protect females from sexual contact with the Others?
You've said the community would seek to protect the females, especially if Neandertal rapists were a threat. How would a primitive community protect these women, other than by telling them they're grounded?
You mention in post 42 "women were usually not even passed from one tribe or clan to another," so it's not that.
My position is that there was not much of this kind of protection going on, before people even understood that sex results in babies, and before people acquired scruples about sexual activity.
Protecting the bloodlines or the patriline isn't a concern until people understand the mechanism of reproduction. Maybe not even then, in some cultures. And how long did it take people to understand that bees do it? Quite a while, and well into historical times. It isn't very obvious how women make babies; the ancient Greeks believed some very silly things about the male/female contributions.
But ok, say they protected the girls but not by keeping them close to home. So...how?
When I said the women would be protected by the community I meant to suggest that if a pack of Cro-Magnon were hanging out down by the water hole below the cave, and a Neanderthal punk came along and started raping one of the Cro-Magnon women, that the other Cro-Magnon would not just carry on with their flint-grinding or finger paint mixing or whatever whilst the Neanderthal raped the Cro-Magnon, but that rather they would beat up and likely kill the Neanderthal punk.
That is all I meant to suggest. In other words, that people generally do not like being raped, and that the Cro-Magnon community would make some effort to prevent it from happening.
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