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 ...
How about disease?
My sister had four of those, not counting her husband.
They have looked at mtDNA sequences in Neanderthal fossils and early human European fossils and the sequences characteristic of Neanderthal fossils are absent from the early human fossils that they've examined. That is powerful evidence of no intermixing, at least so far as the bloodlines of those particular early humans.
The sudden death, the different cranial structure and the DNA can all be explained by the Biblical flood.
b'shem Y'shua
PS. And mtDNA sequences recovered from Neanderthal fossils have not been found in modern humans (meaning humans alive today) either.
Humans are of the group, that have few children and invest their lives in them.
Would not neanderthal do the same?
It would be extraordinary for disease alone to kill an entire population, but it certainly may've been a factor.
The question is whether a human woman would invest her life raising the progeny of a Neandertal man who raped her. I rather doubt it myself.
Hard to believe this thread has gone to 190 posts without a Ping to Blam. (Or did I miss it?)
Maybe I just need a little more coffee, but I'm still wondering about this mtDNA conclusion.
Let's say we have ten generations of females, mother-daughter-daughter...
The first mother in the sequence is pure-CM. She mates with a pure Neandertal and so does every female down the line. (I know, just a thought experiment.)
The tenth lady has mtDNA telling us she's CM. She looks like a Neandertal, as she jolly well ought after all those Neandertal male ancestors.
My question is, are we looking at anything besides her mtDNA? And is mtDNA by itself, in a case like hers, telling us what we need to know? In other words is it giving us truth or just fact?
This is beyond rediculous. Where did the Home Sapiens evolve? how did they move into the areas where the Neanderthals lived. How did one group have a dramatic increase in inteligence while the other remained crude and clumsey? If this is science it is laughable. Why don't we get obliterated by the next big jump in evolution? That people actually believe this cripe is amazing.
I would take you back to not putting too much into the fact that the skeletons look a like.
Did Neanderthals love their children? Don't know. Do cows love their calves? They certainly are attached to them for a while, but they don't appear to love them in our sense. They certainly don't raise them with a concept for the future. But my point wasn't that they didn't love them, it was that they might have grown up much faster.
If a person grew up to adult size and reproductive capability in 2 years vice 13-16, then they would be better at fending for themselves physically, but worse mentally.
Why are you assuming that Neanderthals were human? A goose isn't a duck, despite their similarities.
I am not attacking you, just thinking.
>>The question is whether a human woman would invest her life raising the progeny of a Neandertal man who raped her. I rather doubt it myself.
The question prior to that is whether she and her clan knew that sex causes babies, and moreover, that babies acquire characteristics from fathers. This is obvious to us but not all cave persons grasped it.
Antiguv, like I said, I gotta go, but would you answer this please for Graymatter.
Graymatter, THE NEANDERTHAL ENIGMAN, by James Shreeve covers this very well and its an interesting read.
They still walk among us. See the head on Bob Beckel?
It may be that the answers scientists get depend on what they're looking for. I'd hold off on believing these studies for a long time until the scientists have gotten everything in order.
Here's another thing humans are guilty of.
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