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 ...
And I think Helen graduated with Calamity Jane. Or maybe her older sister. Or maybe her mother.
And besides, that's really insulting to Neandertals.
Any chance that he has Alma ancestry ?
Some imagination? Yes. God's. He imaged it and then made it happen.
There have been some stories indicating that there were very different rates of maturation, unfortunately I do not have the link.
I have also seen the theory that a mother's breasts have the curve that they do because it allows a baby to both nurse and breathe. Since most of the fossils that I have seen indicate that Neandertals had much more forward projecting faces, a female Neandertal would likely be considered to be flat chested by modern humans, and if the hybrid had a significantly flatter face than a Neandertal baby it would likely be suffocated while trying to nurse.
Just another theory why successful interbreeding between humans and Neandertals would be extremely unlikely.
And with a 97% DNA match, we'd be called gorillas!
Just slap a hat on Oink and jab him in the ribs when the sheriff asks his name...
I keep wondering if that was a Jerry Clower story.
He had some good ones.
That could be. My father is of the same generation and the same part of the country as Clower, and he told me a variation of that joke 50 yrs ago.
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