Reconstructed Face Of Hybrid Neanderthal Child
Posted on 01/27/2004 8:08:04 AM PST by blam
'Your forefathers were not Neanderthals'
January 26 2004 at 02:30PM
By Maggie Fox
Washington - You may think your grandparents act like Neanderthals, but United States researchers said on Monday they had strong evidence that modern humans are not descended from them.
A computer analysis of the skulls of modern humans, Neanderthals, monkeys and apes shows that we are substantially different, physically, from those early humans.
New York University paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati said Neanderthals should be considered a separate species from Homo sapiens, and not just a sub-species.
"We interpret the evidence presented here as supporting the view that Neanderthals represent an extinct human species and therefore refute the regional continuity model for Europe," she and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some anthropologists believe that Neanderthals, who went extinct 30 000 years ago, may have at least contributed to the ancestry of modern Europeans.
There is strong evidence that Homo sapiens neanderthalis, as they are known scientifically, interacted with the more modern Cro-Magnons, who eventually displaced them. Cro-Magnons are the ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Some research has suggested they may have interbred to a limited degree, although this is hotly disputed in anthropological circles.
At least one study that looked at fragments of Neanderthal DNA suggested any Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon offspring did not add to the modern gene pool.
Harvati and colleagues combined modern computer technology and the tried-and-true method of determining species that uses physical comparisons.
They examined the skulls of modern humans and Neanderthals and 11 existing species of non-human primates including chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons.
They measured 15 standard skull and face landmarks and used 3-D analysis to superimpose each one on the other.
"From these data, we were able to determine how much variation living primate species generally accommodate, as well as measure how different two primate species that are closely related can be," Harvati said in a statement.
Their computer analyses showed that the differences measured between modern humans and Neanderthals were significantly greater than those found between subspecies of living monkeys and apes.
I can certainly respect your views. However, you have to acknowledge that your views have nothing to do with science and are unproveable.
I have not heard anything about this, so I cannot comment.
I'll go even further- the Bible is a textbook on morality and ethics. That is what people should focus on when they read the Bible, not some vague creation myths which have little or nothing to do with the major themes of the Bible.
Would Jesus' moral message be any less powerful if humans evolved from single-celled organisms?
To think that we have trouble identifying offspring of people who lived 100 years ago, or even still living. If we could be sure we had all the evidence even though it only covers a coffeetable we could devise a coherent hypothesis. But we have barely begun to find evidence and every new find seems to force a change in the hypothesis rather than confirm the hypothesis. We're still early in the investigation.
Try this link:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Neanderthal.html
Or do a Google search for "neanderthal hybrid"
I believe in a special creation of life on this earth by God - recently - perhaps ~6000-10000 years ago.
Yet at #22 you admitted that:
"Most of the fossil evidence for "pre-humans" won't even cover a coffee table".
Why does such fossil evidence exist if life on this earth was created " - recently - perhaps ~6000-10000 years ago" ? And where do the many 'tables' of neanderthal fossils fit in to your belief?
Exactly! Paleoanthropology is such a small and distinct field of study that most people have not the training nor the knowledge to understand wether the scientists are talking "crazy" or not. These folks get to dictate the "evolution of man" to the world at will, and most people buy it "hook, line, and sinker". Is there room for "experts" in this world? Of course! But everything "scientific" should be questioned and the orthodoxy here that cannot, nor will not be questioned, is this: man evolved to his current form from something less complex in the manner paleoanthropoligists have dictated. Any evidence pointing otherwise has been rejected. At least it's starting to look like the field is taking on a bit of "intellectual honesty" - questioning orthodoxy gets you closer to the truth every time, even if your questioning eventually agrees with said orthodoxy.
I see no cognitive dissonance. The Earth was created perfect, man rebelled, so God's creation began to degenerate. Genetic mutations + bottleneck effects could have easily lead to degenrate forms of "humanity" after the fall. My faith actually expects to see hominid type forms that are not quite human but close.
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this ping list.
"I have not heard anything about this, so I cannot comment."
I think it highly likely that some interbreeding occurred. The problem with anthropologists is that they tend to see evolutionary progression as a one-dimensional thing, i.e., X led to Y which led to Z and so on. For X, Y, and Z they have only the particular species that have been discovered, not the plethora of transitional forms in between, which may have numbered in the hundreds and consisted of types whose differences were so minute as to be undetectable. The same thing applies to history. There's a tendency to see everything moving in a linear progression with no interaction or branching-out involved. The untrained historian sees, for example, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Hittites, each in its own context, without really understanding that there was continual movement of all these peoples, inside, outside, and upside down, and continual interaction between them.
Reconstructed Face Of Hybrid Neanderthal Child
LOL - the retort of a child :-)
Amen. Well stated. It's like trying to track race using linguistics.
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