Posted on 02/25/2006 5:11:22 AM PST by ThreePuttinDude
LONDON — Neanderthals in Europe were killed off by the advance of modern humans thousands of years earlier than previously believed, losing a competition for food and shelter, according to a scientific study published Wednesday.
The research uses advances in radiocarbon dating to revise understanding of early humans, suggesting they colonized Europe more rapidly and coexisted for a much shorter period with genetic ancestors.
Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge and author of the study, said Neanderthals — the species of the Homo genus that lived in Europe and western Asia from around 230,000 years ago to around 29,000 years ago — succumbed much more readily to competition.
"The two sides were competing for the same territories, the same animals and fuel supplies and occupying the same cave spaces. With that kind of competition, the Neanderthals were always going to come out as the losers," said Mellars, whose paper was published in the journal Nature.
Modern humans — those anatomically the same as people today — were also better equipped to deal with a 6 degree Celsius (11 Fahrenheit) fall in temperatures around 40,000 years ago.
"Because they had better clothing, better technology(??) and a better mastery of fire, the humans were equipped to deal with it," Mellars said.
Mellars used the results of two recent studies of radiocarbon dating — a process of assessing age by counting radioactive decay of carbon in materials — to refine dates determined from fossils, bone fragments and other physical evidence that relates to the spread of humans.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I will need to reflect on your response.
The most primitive people now alive are "modern" and display "modern" social norms. Yet truly modern people as you describe them interbreed like rabbits. Ever wonder why jews come in so many different colors?
Without the barriers of geography, people have always shown a proclivity to interbreed. That doesn't mean that humans and neanderthals did, it just means that your argument doesn't hold water.
Neanderthals have been found all over Eurasia. They were definately not limited to Europe.
Hey, gimme a break, it's a movie, not a documentary. It was memorable, which is more than you can say for 99% of the dredge coming out of Hollywood these days. Not a single word is spoken in the entire movie, and yet it still holds your attention. My wife hated it, though...lol.
Why would humans *want* to mate with Neanderthals? *They were ugly.* I mean, really, really butt ugly.
Kind of like you S-man.
Or have you been too busy until now wiping Buffalo behinds?
One clue to really primitive man is a zero quotient of "Sense of Humor".
>>Until very modern times, women were usually not even passed from one tribe or clan to another, much less all the way to another species.
We don't really know what the Neandertals did, though. For all we know they started ritually killing and eating females for some misguided notion.
And what are we talking about here---our guys and their women, or their guys and our women? Big difference, believe me, I'm a girl.
We DO know what most of us would do if one of you boys dragged a Neandertal woman back to camp, and that is: her kid would not play with our kids. (Nor mate with them.) The Neandertal who survives in our camp would likely be a woman who would not become a grandmother to anybody. If a male, he would likely not become a father to anybody.
And unless they were even stupider than we currently surmise, the Neandertals would have had similar results with a Cro-Magnon in their camp.
Both the Aztec and Mayans used metals, I don't believe they could be considered stone age although I agree with the premise of your argument.
I think the wave of human settlers appearing in the Middle East and Europe before the Ice Age Maximum of about 35,000 years ago brought hunting pressure and perhaps warfare, as stated by the author, but disease, if carried over to a previously isolated population of humans, like it did to the American Indian, could have easily wiped out our Neanderthal cousins.
>>>I will need to reflect on your response.
Ok. I mean, I may be incorrect, but that was not my understanding of the definition of evolution.
Yet another example of European genocide (sarcasm).
must keep the "H"
It is the only exampla of a silent letter in the german language, extant, that I know of.
It is because th word pre-dates the Duden, the german language guide, and is actually old german.
It means "The other valley." Which is aprropos this discussion, because the folks in the other valley - over the next hill - were considered another species, not human, etc.
Unfortunately, just because the predator is human, that doesn't exempt the process from being a part of natural selection. Consider too the dodo, perhaps the mammoth.
I agree such actions are regretable (especially given modern levels of knowledge), but we are part of nature.
"Possibly the biggest advantage was language, the jury's out on that but some scientists say Neandertals weren't effective speakers. But that isn't technology of course, only the ability to pass it along."
In comparing the Neanderthal skull with the Modern skull, it appears to me that there is an opening in the modern skull (auricular foramen?) that does not appear on the Neandertal. Perhaps a difference was the that they had a less developed sense of hearing? Hard to pass on information if everyone in your family unit is deaf.
Also, since we do not have Neanderthal soft tissues (perhaps we will find one buried in the permafrost of the tundra someday) it would seem harder to speculate on their ability to speak.
apropos - geez, my spelling really does suck. LOL.
First of all, we can't apply that definition of species dogmatically to Neanderthals and humans because we are unable to tell by looking at their bones whether they were capable of interbreeding. Originally they were considered to be a subspecies, so one would think that they almost certainly would have been capable of interbreeding, but currently it is thought that they represent a distinct species. So it is unknown whether or not interbreeding would be genetically possible.
Secondly, even assuming that interbreeding could produce viable offspring, there are many other variables that can reduce the odds of interbreeding to zero. There are many species that are capable of interbreeding artificially but do not in nature because of behavioral and physiological constraints.
Probably the most significant factor to be considered in interbreeding is the intelligence of the species. We all know that modern humans are quite adept at dividing groups into Self and Other. For humans, Neanderthals would have been decidedly Other. We don't know if Neanderthals had this same tendency towards bigotry (most likely, since it has adaptive value), but we do know that they were fairly insular, living in small family groups, not travelling very far, and not engaging in trade to any great extent. This makes alliances between the species unlikely.
Because the Neanderthals seem to have been fairly insular it is unlikely they would welcome a human male into their population. They may have felt differently about human females. However, they probably would find it difficult to get their hands on them considering humans considered women to be a valuable commodity. Because of this, they would be unlikely to allow the small bands of Neanderthals to steal women. On the other hand, humans would be unlikely to allow a Neanderthal male (Other and male to boot) into their group to mate with a human woman. They might be more accepting of Neanderthal women, but in general they probably considered human women preferable.
All of this would have been compounded if it is true (as some have argued) that Neanderthals had not developed sufficiently for complex language. It is certain that they could make a wide variety of vocalizations, but it's hard to say if they had speech.
That is a lie. The most primitive people now alive are virtually indistinguishable from the contemporaries of the Neanderthals.
Without the barriers of geography, people have always shown a proclivity to interbreed.
There are distinct patterns to the way that people interbreed and the circumstances within which they interbreed and none of them are even remotely comparable to those of humans that would've been contemporaries of Neanderthals.
Ever wonder why jews come in so many different colors?
This almost made me swear. LOL! Well, I did swear to myself.. :)
The reason Jews come in so many different colors is because Jews were conquered by an urban civilization and then dispersed across an urban civilization.
There were no urban civilizations in the era of the Neanderthals.
And human intermixing (between tribes/clans) in pre-urban cultures is so rare and fleeting as to be all but nonexistent.
I was replying to your post #67, thus your reference to not getting your "humor" is completely misplaced. Surely someone that gives lectures on spell checking could figure that out.
As you have jumped straight from lecturing to name calling, I have a good idea of what I'm dealing with here. I'll stand by my posts.
Actually, neanderthals ranged from Europe into the Middle East. There are several sites in Israel, for example, that had at one time archaic homo sapiens populations (about 200,000 years ago) that were REPLACED with homo neanderthalis unitl about 100,000 years ago when modern homo sapiens came out from Africa. Anyway, there were considerable homo neanderthalis remains found in Turkey, Iraq, and Israel.
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