Posted on 02/25/2006 5:11:22 AM PST by ThreePuttinDude
ok, as you wish.
Hmm.. This was remarkably imprecise language on my part!
When I say virtually indistinguishable I mean in the context of what you'd said, that the most primitive people now alive are "modern" and display "modern" social norms. Since the social norms we're referring to are those related to breeding, what I am saying is that the most primitive people alive (the Sentinelese) are no more "modern" in the presumptive sense (e.g., post-Industrial) with regard to breeding norms than were the contemporaries of the Neanderthals.
There, that's more precise!
I once read an interesting hypothesis that suggested Neanderthal, because of his larger brain case, didn't have enough room in his mouth for his wisdom teeth. This would have caused severe dental problems.
On the other hand, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that the two subspecies simply assimilated one another. There really wasn't much difference between them, other than some very small morphological factors. And just as a wolf has all the genetic factors needed to make a poodle, Neanderthal might simply have evolved into a type indistinguishable from what the paleoanthropologists like to think of as "modern" man.
Reminds me of a Far Side cartoon. Some "modern man" kids taunting a caveman: "Neanderthal! Neanderthal! Can't make fire! Nya! Nya! Nya!"
Yes, but in order to get Neanderthal genes into Cro-Magnon communities you need to have the Cro-Magnon woman get together with the Neanderthal man, and then return to the Cro-Magnon community to raise the child.
And, just looking at the cultural norms and sexual behavior of pre-urban, subsistence communities within the historical record, that scenario borders on the absurd. IMHO of course.
At one point I read they were also built better for running and their arms for throwing. If a bunch of people can run up to your encampment, throw rocks or spears, then run away faster than you can catch up to them, you got a big problem, long term
Unless you have some really old video or diaries, you don't know this. You know that their tools and means of attaining food are very similar if not the same. What you don't know is if their social norms are the same.
You're getting very hot that I'm attacking your ideas as untrue. I'm not. I'm saying that alough they may be true, there are so many variables and exceptions that it is a troubled argument not likely to win over people.
My point is that it is likely that the differences between humans and neanderthals were likely much greater and more severe than any diffences in living human communities. Therefore, why hang your hat on the weaker argument?
Indeed, it is far from known whether any interbreeding was even scientifically possible.
I'd be happy to agree with you if you are limiting your argument to, "Because humans show a tendancy to exclude outsiders, deformed, etc. from the breeding pool, it is possible that much more severe differences in ability, aesthetics, diet, etc. could completely eliminate interbreeding." But then I've already said that, although probably not in the posts directly to you.
And human intermixing (between tribes/clans) in pre-urban cultures is so rare and fleeting as to be all but nonexistent.
And what could the possible evidence for this be? You are saying that each band of hunter gatherers were genetically pure unto themselves, breaking up, but never coming together. This would even exclude rape and conquest of the women, which occurred a lot for sure later on. So why would urbanization bring this about if humans were incapable of breeding outside of their clans before? Mind you, you're making a "100% of the time" statement here, as it relates to Neanderthals.
On second thought, considering the time scales involved, post-urban would be a better standard for "modern" than would be post-industrial.
But even by that standard the Sentinelese are hardly modern! They are pre-urban. And they aren't the only ones either. So, to wrap my part in this whole digression up, my conjectures have been extrapolated from the behaviors of non-urban subsistence tribes.
See my post #142.
Not that I don't enjoy a good rant, but what are you talking about?
Perhaps. Certainly no one has an answer yet.
Is carbon dating an exact science now?
There are lots of differences in the skeletons; there are literally hundreds of papers in the technical literature comparing the differences, usually using multivariate statistics.
Carbon-14 dating is getting pretty good with the calibration curves. These are worked out by literally counting individual tree rings, dating rings of a known age and then building a detailed table which will correct for atmospheric variations. It goes back past 12,000 years now. When supplemented with glacial varves and other methods, it goes well past 20,000 years.
Here are a few links on the subject:
ReligiousTolerance.org Carbon-14 Dating (C-14): Beliefs of New-Earth CreationistsThe American Scientific Affiliation: Science in Christian Perspective Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens.
This site, BiblicalChronologist.org has a series of good articles on radiocarbon dating.
Are tree-ring chronologies reliable? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)
Tree Ring and C14 DatingHow does the radiocarbon dating method work? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)
How precise is radiocarbon dating?
Is radiocarbon dating based on assumptions?
Has radiocarbon dating been invalidated by unreasonable results?
Radiocarbon WEB-info Radiocarbon Laboratory, University of Waikato, New Zealand.
When a conquerer rapes a woman and she bears the child and raises it the child is in the conquered community. The two communities get mixed, but over in the conquered community.
If a Cro-Magnon raped a Neanderthal and she had a child over in the Neanderthal community that is irrelevant to the issue at hand. Because the Neanderthal communities all eventually went extinct, so any intermixed genes also went extinct.
So, in order for the the genes to persist, it would have to be a Neanderthal that raped a Cro-Magnon woman, and then the woman would have to return to the Cro-Magnon community and birth a product of that rape and also raise the product of that rape.
This is all presumed for the simple reason that we do not find evidence of mixed communities. If we did, then this whole debate would be moot...
I guess its just a matter of semantics, for me the knowledge of metallurgy defines the age - whether it was used for tool making by the populace as a whole or not doesn't mean as much to me because the technology existed. When we talk about the early human and pre-human people, the understanding of metallurgy hadn't existed yet.
PS. The phrase "rare and fleeting" is not a "100% of the time" statement.
Also, I am hardly limiting my argument to this. I have presented several different arguments on several different levels. This just happens to be the one that has produced the most extended discussion. I'm not even sure what you're arguing with me about. I think your problem is with my statement that modern humans have a sex of aesthetics and don't usually go out of their way to have sex with butt ugly people. If I'm correct, what you're saying is that humans 30,000 years ago might not have had the same aesthetic, and might've loved ravishing Neanderthals.
That's all fine and good, but in order to get the Neanderthal genes up here to the modern human gene pool what you need is human *women* having sex with Neanderthal men. So maybe the problem here is that you're thinking only in terms of human men, some proportion of which will put it in just about anything when push comes to shove.
OK, my point is that you are assuming that "modern" non-urban subsistence tribes show the same social norms as pre-historic humans. This is reasonable, yet not definate. But let's go with it. Does it preclude meaningful interbreeding barring other factors? I'd say no. Taking the women of other tribes and forcing them into your tribe, is a behavior of many "primitives". Thus Neanderthal women would have been expected to rear their ugly heads (so to speak) in the gene pool, which DNA study claims to preclude. That's why I'm guessing there were stronger factors involved.
Should we pay them reparations to make it right?
I meant a "sense of aesthetics" not a "sex of aesthetics" LOL
We do not find mixed communities. That means, we do not find communities of Neanderthal women 'taken' into human tribes. Now, if you want to just conjecture that Neanderthal women were abducted and taken into human tribes as some kind of work horse sex slaves, even though we find no archaeological evidence of that, then that's fine by me, but don't criticize me for making assumptions!
Well, perhaps they were so anti-social (like animals) or unskilled that they couldn't be kept. This is what I mean by stronger differences than simply "social norms" as we apply them to human groupings.
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