Posted on 01/27/2004 1:31:28 PM PST by LibWhacker
Jan. 27, 2004 — In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago.
The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed.
The number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct. One of the scientists involved in the research told Discovery News that a combination of three factors did the Neanderthals in.
"My general take on Neanderthal extinction was that they were in competition with anatomically modern humans at a time when there was increasing severe cold stress that was not only affecting them, but also the food resources they relied on," said Leslie Aiello, head of the University College London Graduate School, and an expert on Neanderthal response to weather.
Neanderthals appear to have tolerated temperatures as cold as zero degrees Fahrenheit, but during the last ice age, winter temperatures dipped to well below freezing. In order to cope, Neanderthals would have needed a lot more food than they were used to obtaining in winter.
"The costs of maintaining internal heat production at the required levels would have only been possible if Neanderthals were able to sustain a correspondingly high level of dietary energy intake," explained Aiello, adding that anatomically modern humans were better at dealing with the cold.
Early Homo sapiens, such as a group called the Gravettians that arose in Europe before the Neanderthals became extinct around 30,000 years ago, were loaded with the latest in prehistoric high tech.
They wore warm clothing made of fur and woven materials, lived in enclosed dwellings, and used effective weapons to ensnare animals and fish.
Paul Pettitt, a Neanderthal expert at the University of Sheffield who agrees with the new study findings, said, "(Gravettian) toolkits reveal a very sophisticated range of weaponry."
He said Neanderthals used spears that required close range contact with their prey, such as hyenas. Neanderthals probably thrust spears, like bayonets, into animals. Gravettians were better equipped.
"Far from general purpose spears deployed in the hand, we now see specialist projectile weapons (javelins) perhaps thrown with the aid of spearthrowers to increase effective range," Pettitt told Discovery News.
With such technologies, our ancestors won the prehistoric battle for survival.
While some researchers theorize that Neanderthals also are related to humans, yet another study, published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims that the skulls of Neanderthals and humans differ too much for Neanderthals to be our relatives.
Lead author Katerina Harvati of New York University said in a press release that we now have "the most concrete evidence to date that Neanderthals are indeed a separate species within the genus Homo."
And Stringer et al still can't figure it out, because it didn't happen. Pesky evidence is puzzling to those devoted to a false premise.Paganism and FoodFood is the product of the earth; the earth is the mother goddess, literally the matrix of our physical existence. We are all products of the stars: earth, animals, plants; all the elements were forged in the reactions in the heart of stars. We are what we eat, so it is important to eat healthily & well. Cooking and eating connect us to the earth and each other. All shared festivities involve special and symbolic food. In Paganism, the body and the earth are sacred; spirit is immanent in matter, not transcendent and beyond it... Herbs have been used for thousands of years as medicines - a Neanderthal burial included herbs for the various ailments the deceased was suffering from.
by Yvonne AburrowFossilized excrement may show links between Neanderthal Man and present day humansFossilized excrement found in a cave in Gibraltar may show whether there are links between Neanderthal man and present day humans, British scientists said Wednesday. Professor Chris Stringer of London hailed what he called a "spectacular discovery" earlier this year by a team of international experts. After they found the specimens near a fireplace, the scientists wrapped them in metal foil and plastic bags to prevent contamination. In January, the specimens will be sent to Munich to be sectioned and analyzed for DNA content. Scientists do not yet know why Neanderthal man died 27,000 to 35,000 years ago.
Thursday December 18th 1997
pabianice: DUH! Freezing is 32 degrees F, not zero degrees F.Seems like a reasonable conclusion.
Bonaparte: Since freezing is 32o F., I conclude that this writer doesn't know of what she speaks.
Calamari: Wide spread acceptance of same sex marriage?:'D Given the Neandertal upper body strength, I'm guessin' that the Cro-Magnons would have discovered Europe to be like a sea-to-shining-sea wide open great outdoors version of federal penitentiary, minus the bar of soap. Unless the Neandertal invented that, too...
highimpact: I think the Neanderthal extinction was most likely the result of \conservatism run amock. If a more liberal/socialist agenda had been adopted by rulers of their time (tax the homo sapiens!), they would probably still be thriving in a communist utopia today.
By the way -- your father and you are not related if you can't find any of his tissue. Only the mtDNA sez whether or not you're descended from anyone. :'PNeandertal DNAThe scientists obtained a sequence of 379 amino acid base pairs by replicating shorter, overlapping segments. They identified 27 differences between the Neandertal DNA and a modern reference DNA sample over the replicated sequence. By contrast, DNA from a random sample of a modern population might vary from the reference DNA in five to eight places.
by Mark Rose
July 29, 1997
Fathers can be influential tooBiologists have warned for some years that paternal mitochondria do penetrate the human egg and survive for several hours... Erika Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues... were carrying out a study of mitochondrial DNAs from hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in order to study the history of human migration into this region of the western Pacific... People from all three mitochondrial groups live on Nguna. And, in all three groups, Hagelberg's group found the same mutation, a mutation previously seen only in an individual from northern Europe, and nowhere else in Melanesia, or for that matter anywhere else in the world... Adam Eyre-Walker, Noel Smith and John Maynard Smith from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK confirm this view with a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of the so-called 'homoplasies' that appear in human mitochondrial DNA... reanalysis of a selection of European and African mitochondrial DNA sequences by the Sussex researchers suggests that recombination is a far more likely cause of the homoplasies, as they find no evidence that these sites are particularly variable over all lineages.
by Eleanor LawrenceIs Eve older than we thought?"Two studies prove that the estimation of both when and where humanity first arose could be seriously flawed... The ruler scientists have been using is based on genetic changes in mitochondria, simple bacteria that live inside us and control the energy requirements of our cells. Mitochondria are passed from mother to daughter and their genes mutate at a set rate which can be estimated - so many mutations per 1,000 years... However, these calculations are based upon a major assumption which, according to Prof John Maynard Smith, from Sussex University, is 'simply wrong'. The idea that underpins this dating technique is that mitochondria, like some kinds of bacteria, do not have sex... Two groups of researchers, Prof Maynard Smith and colleagues Adam Eyre-Walker and Noel Smith, also from Sussex, and Dr Erika Hagelberg and colleagues from the University of Otago, New Zealand, have found that mitochondria do indeed have sex - which means that genes from both males and females is mixed and the DNA in their offspring is very different... Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis... For the 'out-of-Africa' theory to hold water, the first population would have to have been very small. Sexually rampant mitochondria may put paid to this idea. Maynard Smith thinks that the origin of humanity is much older - may be twice as old - which, according to Eyre-Walker, means we are likely to have evolved in many different areas of the world and did not descend from Eve in Africa."
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
ValerieUSA: Come on over and I'll broil some steaks for us.I like how you think. :')
Calamari: Are Neanderthals and Cro Magnons just different breeds and did a line of hybrids pop up that bred "true" and retained it's own outward characteristics generation after generation?The alternative is that the morphological characteristics, including the one mentioned above, and many others, including the Asian eyefold (a characteristic that won't show up in the fossil record, unless someone's face happened to be imprinted in hot lava or something) arose since the supposed egress from Africa in the past 50 to 100 thousand years.
Bonaparte: I've always found that "investigators" like the ones cited in the header article are impossible to embarass, no matter what you point out to them... No matter how many offenses against logic and methodology you identify and bring to their attention, they are married to their conclusion and won't abandon it.I agree. It's hard to embarrass people who are only interested in getting their next gubmint grant -- IOW, taxpayer dollars -- and grinding their political axes.
Modern multiregionalists still believe that there was a common African origin, but place it millions of years ago. The replacement camp sez that the previous hominids originated in Africa and spread out from there, but that for some reason a master race, er, AMH, with superior characteristics, skills, and weapons, migrated out of Africa 50 to 100 thousand years ago and took over everything, driving earlier hominids into extinction by about 20,000 years ago (at the latest). Since the continental shelf has been exposed plenty of the past 2 million years (at least it has been in the gradualist models, and due to glaciation), much of the formerly habitable land has never given up its fossils. And that 2 million year period is precisely when Erectus has been loping around.A new mystery evolves on trail of early humansNew studies of the Y chromosome, the bundle of DNA that distinguishes men from women, suggest that current branches of the human family tree derive from a male ancestor who may have lived only 50,000 years ago, scientists reported last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Previous studies, based on a type of DNA passed on only by women, indicate that the most recent common female ancestor, or "Eve," lived at least 150,000 years ago... "Something happened to the record 50,000 to 60,000 years ago," said Peter Oefner, a biologist at the Stanford DNA Sequencing and Technology Center and one of the authors of the study. "We started at ground zero again." ...The new evidence, based on analysis of the DNA of 72 males from 46 populations, is striking, Dr. Oefner said... Dr. Oefner is quick to warn that... [t]he average estimate coming out of the new data is 50,000 years, he said, but that male could have lived anywhere from 40,000 to 140,000 years ago.
by Emily Sohn
06/26/2000
There was no such event, no going "their separate ways". With whom did the 23 chromosome pair newly human freak mate and reproduce? This genetic discontinuity results from a false assumption, and leads to speculation like that above.Did Viruses Make Us Human?The human genome is littered with scraps of DNA that serve no clearly defined function. Scientists believe these transposons -- so called because they can jump around the chromosomes -- were acquired millions or billions of years ago, when viruses inserted their own DNA into that of the host. Until recently, transposons were regarded as genetic junk. But when geneticists discovered that the junk accounts for nearly half of our genome, "people started to seriously consider that they might contribute to evolution," McDonald says... A single HERV-K element is present in humans but not in chimps. Judging from other measures of genetic change, this transposon appeared 6 million years ago, exactly when humans and chimps went their separate ways. McDonald hypothesizes that bits of viral DNA might have inserted themselves and altered functional genes, modifying the proteins they make, or the viral bits might have incited a reshuffling of the primate genome.
by Kathy A. Svitil
Morgan obviously uses this to buttress her Aquatic Ape theory, since the area where (in her view) hominids became Homo Sapiens was in a supposedly isolated chunk of eastern Africa, temporarily separated from the mainland by open water. It was a nice safe place, free of predators, and the hominids just lucked out when the land split. IOW, it's just an anachronistic fantasyland.The Scars of Evolution"The most remarkable aspect of Todaro's discovery emerged when he examined Homo Sapiens for the 'baboon marker'. It was not there... Todaro drew one firm conclusion. 'The ancestors of man did not develop in a geographical area where they would have been in contact with the baboon. I would argue that the data we are presenting imply a non-African origin of man millions of years ago.'"
by Elaine Morgan
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Have you heard anything more about this?
The author may have confused Fahrenheit with Centigrade. Freezing on the Centigrade scale does come in at a convenient zero degrees. However, I do have to wonder at how much science the writer has, being unable to differentiate between these two scales - something any halfway bright high school sophmore ought to be able to do.
Those guys that were around 27-35000 years ago, man, they all died, every last one of them.
Those guys that were around 27-35000 years ago, man, they all died, every last one of them.
"Neanderthals appear to have tolerated temperatures as cold as zero degrees Fahrenheit, but during the last ice age, winter temperatures dipped to well below freezing."
Zero degrees Fahrenheit is very cold. It is approaching artic. Animals without a solid slab of blubber , combined with hibernation , or else body fat combined with a thick wooly coat are unlikely to survive prolongued exposure.
The soft sciences have gone into the realm of the silly, you can't do anything but laugh....
Looking for published papers or a curriculum vitae, all I came up with are her dozen or so titles for juvenile literature in science topics. I think she's just a reporter.
When in doubt you can't beat "heads or talus?"
Is it possible that after 25,000 years there is still a vestige of the idea of subhumans left in modern culture? Why, yes, there are people on earth who regard all other races than their own as subhuman or at least more primitive even though true subhumans have been totally gone all this time. This idea can be found all over Europe for sure, but it also exists in other regions such as China.
Had almost completely forgotten about this thread! The operative phrase is "all other races," and what you say is true. I know one thing . . . Given events of the last 40 years, I definitely don't think very highly of arabs. And if I know my genes, they've got the throwback gene in spades!
Nope
"Reparations" for those that have been taught to be Inferior
As a Class
Not Individually
Because it is not their fault that they have to be on welfare for three or four generations
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.