[varmintman]

All of the creatures you mention other than for the Cro Magnons were hominids, i.e. bipedal apes which, as far as we have any real evidence for, are all extinct, most likely because our own ancestors killed them all.

Logic is the most major tool which God has given us for understanding our world; any sort of a science theory or claim which cannot pass a sniff test for basic logic is junk science; on a scale of 1 - 10 for ability to generate logical breakdowns amongst people with PHD degrees, the Neanderthal is at least a 9.

There are several kinds of such breakdowns. One is the claim that we and the Neanderthal have a "common ancestor". The Neanderthal has been abandoned as a plausible evolutionary antecedent for modern man precisely because the genetic gap is too large (DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee). Anything 300K - 500K years back which anybody could try to claim was a "common ancestor(TM)" to both us and the Neanderthal (Usually given as homo Heidelbergensis)", would be much more remote from us THAN the Neanderthal. Too-genetically-remote-to-be-ancestral-to is a transitive relationship and the nature of such relationships doesn't require graduate level math; you'd think the people making this particular claim would figure the problem out sooner or later but they don't seem to.

Another is this new claim of 1 - 4% Neanderthal genes in everybody other than Africans. Once again, the Neanderthal was a glorified ape. Any crossbreeding with a glorified ape PRIOR to the bottleneck and Africans would not get left out. Any crossing AFTER the bottleneck and not involving Africans as claimed, and the genetic gap between Africans and everybody else would be gigantic, rather than minuscule as it actually is.

Then of course there is the problem of thinking that a Neanderthal male could/would rape a woman and, rather than cooking and eating her afterwards as usual, somehow or other keep her alive long enough to bear a cross-species child, raise that child to reproductive age, and have him/her breed back into human populations without anybody catching on.....

In real life, Neanderthal females would kill that woman the first time her new owner left her alone for ten minutes; the woman wouldn't fare any better than the subjects of the commie attempts to breed humans and apes into super workers in the 1930s (no subjects survived); humans would notice the child was different (the fur coat, the odd taste for bananas etc.); and the humans would kill that child and everybody else like him as part of the same program which killed out the Neanderthal. They would not need DNA tests to determine who to kill for that sort of reason, again, it would be exceedingly obvious.

Why would it be exceedingly obvious you ask??

Again this is what a Neanderthal would look like without the 6" ice-age fur coat, image courtesy www.themandus.org:

We're not related to them.

[BroJoeK]

varmintman: "The Neanderthal has been abandoned as a plausible evolutionary antecedent for modern man precisely because the genetic gap is too large (DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee)."

Your claim has been posted and corrected here before.
Here it is again, in a nutshell:

• Any two humans on average are different by about 3 million "base pair" mutations -- that is .1% of 3 billion total base pairs.
  Of course, biologically all humans can interbreed with each other.

• Humans and Neaderthals' DNA differs by about 9 million "base pair" mutations, which is .3% of 3 billion total base pairs.
  DNA analysis shows about 4% interbreeding between Neanderthals & Europeans, down to 1% with Asians, but zero with Africans.

• Depending on exactly what and how you count, human and chimp DNA differs by 50 million to well over 100 million "base pair" mutations.
  Of course, humans and chimps can not interbreed, under any circumstances.

Bottom line: Neanderthal DNA was over 90% closer to humans than to chimpanzees, indeed Neanderthals were close enough to interbreed with Europeans, which means they were not a separate species at all, but rather a sub-species of homo-sapiens.

varmintman: "All of the creatures you mention other than for the Cro Magnons were hominids, i.e. bipedal apes..."

The word "hominid" refers to all great apes -- orangutans, gorillas, chimps and humans -- who branched from common ancestors around 14 million years ago.
The word "hominid" also refers in a more restricted sense to humans and pre-human relatives more closely related than chimpanzees.

varmintman: "Anything 300K - 500K years back which anybody could try to claim was a "common ancestor(TM)" to both us and the Neanderthal (Usually given as homo Heidelbergensis)", would be much more remote from us THAN the Neanderthal.
Too-genetically-remote-to-be-ancestral-to is a transitive relationship "

All modern Europeans and Asians are recognized today as having migrated "out of Africa" beginning around 125,000 years ago.
So no pre-existing pre-human populations in Europe or Asia were our ancestors, but there is DNA and fossil evidence of some interbreeding with Neanderthals.

varmintman: "Another is this new claim of 1 - 4% Neanderthal genes in everybody other than Africans.
Once again, the Neanderthal was a glorified ape.
Any crossbreeding with a glorified ape PRIOR to the bottleneck and Africans would not get left out.
Any crossing AFTER the bottleneck and not involving Africans as claimed, and the genetic gap between Africans and everybody else would be gigantic, rather than minuscule as it actually is. "

We are "glorified" apes -- hominids.
Neanderthals were rather more humble, I'd think.

Whatever interbreeding happened as modern humans migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe, was relatively minor, leaving traces of 1% to 4% in our DNA.
This suggests an occasional "boys night out", but, but, which were the "boys" and which were the "girls" they went to visit? ;-)
More important, why did their parents allow these offspring to live and grow up?