Replies

pabianice: DUH! Freezing is 32 degrees F, not zero degrees F.

Bonaparte: Since freezing is 32o F., I conclude that this writer doesn't know of what she speaks.

Seems like a reasonable conclusion.

Calamari: Wide spread acceptance of same sex marriage?

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.

:'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...

The previous "most concrete evidence to date that Neanderthals are indeed a separate species within the genus Homo":

Neandertal DNA
by Mark Rose
July 29, 1997
The 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 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. :'P

The presumed number of base pairs in the original sample (living tens of thousands of years ago) of mtDNA is over 16,000. The alleged scientists who authored the so-called study claimed that they had 379 contiguous base pairs -- out of the 16,000+ -- and that it varied from modern values. And (for that matter) that the mtDNA studied could be matched up with a modern sequence -- which it did not match -- and could not possibly have been non-contiguous, and could not possibly have been from a different part of the mtDNA, and could not possibly have been from a non-hominid (i.e., a bacteria which munched the remains quietly away shortly after the guy died). And of course, that mtDNA could not possibly have an unpredictable rate of change, or that it may actually come from both sides to any extent...

Fathers can be influential too
by Eleanor Lawrence
Biologists 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.
Is Eve older than we thought?
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
"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."

Excellent posts, Civ.
Come on over and I'll broil some steaks for us.
Soup is for Neandertals.

If dogs were extinct and we had no knowledge of dogs at the present time and you dug up the skeleton of a fossilized dog, say a Great Dane or a Saint Bernard at an excavation site and a fellow "scientist" discovered a fossilized Chihuahua or Dachshund at another site the conclusion might be that you have different species when in reality you only have different breeds of the same species.

They could interbreed and produce off spring that look different from the parents. Carry this on for generations and you could not tell by looking who the ancestors were in several breeding cycles.

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? Modern Humans

Thank you, SC. 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.

Thanks for the information that the "scientists" seem to ignore.

The pro-replacement "spin" is annoying. Stuff like "Is Eve older than we thought? by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999" (at the "in reply to" link) is the headline for an article that sez that there was no mitochondrial "Eve". And the devotion to the baseless mtDNA "studies" leads to other nonsense conclusions:

A new mystery evolves on trail of early humans
by Emily Sohn
06/26/2000
New 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.

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.

Did Viruses Make Us Human?
by Kathy A. Svitil
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.

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.

About 30 years ago a book The Descent of Woman by the following author failed to make a case against the savannah theory of hominid evolution. The book linked below continues that struggle. The Aquatic Ape theory is at least somewhat respectible now, but there's so much in the way of politics involved that I can't get fired up about it. The info about the baboon virus was in this book (previously I'd been unaware of it). Quote follows the URL.

The Scars of Evolution
by Elaine Morgan
"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.'"

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 same biological characteristics of humans used to suggest a coastal origin have also been pointed out as mitigating against a natural origin for Homo Sapiens. In other words, all those ideas that have extraterrestrials or intelligent dinosaurs manipulating DNA to produce our ancestors, grow in the same soil. This is not meant to belittle or condemn any or all of these three ideas through association with the others.