Posted on 02/06/2007 7:07:15 PM PST by Soothesayer
DID ANATOMICALLY modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals, the muscle-bound, big-browed and possibly mute cave dwellers who disappeared from Europe and the Middle East about 30,000 years ago? The answer may be less interesting than the fact that so many Homo sapiens are fixated on the question. The debate about whether there's a Neanderthal skeleton in our collective closet was revived last week when two groups of scientists reported that they had deciphered DNA from the thigh bone of a Neanderthal man who lived in Croatia 38,000 years ago. From their analysis of genetic material in the bone, the scientists estimated that Neanderthals and the modern people who supplanted them had 99.5% of their genes in common. This will come as an unpleasant surprise to anyone who remembers the film "Clan of the Cave Bear," in which a comely Cro-Magnon played by Daryl Hannah was adopted into a clan of brutish Neanderthals. But it will cheer anthropologists who argue that if you gave a Neanderthal a bath, a haircut and an iPod, he would blend in with any contemporary crowd. Since the discovery in the 19th century of Neanderthal remains in Germany's Neander Valley, scientific opinion has seesawed between the idea that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end only distantly related to modern humans and the view that at least some Neanderthals felt the urge to merge with smarter, nimbler modern humans who left Africa about 100,000 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Man... I just had to post this :)
The Neanderthal theory of autism
http://www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm
I hate that cave man dude!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can't stand that Cave Man.
It's because he's so "sensitive".
They have found ramains morphologically intermediate between neanderthals and modern humans from the Middle East and possibly other places. Hopefully, they will have their DNA analyzed to determine if neanderthal genes were strongly expressed in some of modern humans' immediate ancestors.
That looks more like interbreeding with the hog family.
I think you hit it on the head. Reminds me of some PC liberal.
Excuse me, "Cave man" is an insult; It`s "Inland residential cavity dweller".
GEICO. So simple a cave man can do it.
I know you didn't post it for scientific reasons, but a 99.5% correlation in DNA reflects a distinct break between us and the Neanderthals.
Heavyweight boxer, Nikolai Valuev, comes to mind.
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