Neanderthals 'Hardly Differed at All' from Modern Humans

Science Daily ^ | 05/11/2010

[SeekAndFind]

How much do we, who are alive today, differ from our most recent evolutionary ancestors, the cave-dwelling Neanderthals, hominids who lived in Europe and parts of Asia and went extinct about 30,000 years ago? And how much do Neanderthals, in turn, have in common with the ape-ancestors from which we are both descended, the chimpanzees?

Although we are both hominids, the fossil record told us long ago that we differ physically from Neanderthals, in various ways. But at the level of genes and the proteins that they encode, new research published online May 6 in the journal Science reveals that we differ hardly at all. It also indicates that we both -- Neanderthals and modern humans -- differ from the chimps in virtually identical ways.

"The astonishing implication of the work we've just published," says Prof. Gregory Hannon, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), "is that we are incredibly similar to Neanderthals at the level of the proteome, which is the full set of proteins that our genes encode."

Collaboration with a paleogenetics pioneer

Hannon, who is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is well known for his work on small RNAs and RNA interference, was invited this past year to help examine Neandertal DNA by Dr. Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in paleogenetics, a field that employs genome science to study early humans and other Paleolithic-era creatures. In a separate paper, Pääbo's team today publishes in the same issue of Science the first complete genome sequence for Neandertal, an achievement that builds on work he has led since 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Genomics in Leipzig.

[wendy1946]

The neanderthal was a very advanced, extinct ape. That does not mean that he could not function at a high level, just that he was not related to us. Having DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee means that he could not interbreed with us, and that there is zero possibility of our being descended from him via any process resembling evolution since in order to be descended from something, at some point, you have to be able to interbreed with the something.

[wendy1946]

Fossil records show common ancestors for chimps and humans around 5 million years ago, but for Neanderthals and humans less than one million years ago. By the way, the fossil record shows all-together nearly two dozen different "pre-human" species, including Neanderthals.

That is also BS on numerous levels, not the least being the question of whether our planet is even one million years old.

One of America's best mathematicians over the last century, Robert Bass, actually redid Lord Kelvin's heat equations for the planet WITH a maximal figure for radioactive materials, and got an outer bound of around 200M years, and got thrown out of BYU for the exercise (disruptive technology or some such).

The people claiming these "common ancestors(TM)" for us and Neanderthals are generally the same people still claiming a 60M year antiquity for dinosaurs DESPITE all the new evidence of meat, blood cells, blood vessels, skin cells and what not turning up in dinosaur remains as well as the one nearly complete hadrosaur and the internet age providing us with knowledge of Amerind petroglyphs showing known dinosaur types, e.g.

That of course is the stegosaur (water panther) glyph at Massinaw, Lake Superior, horns added centuries later; Amerind oral traditions describe the creature as having a sawblade back, red fur, and a "great spiked tail" for use as a weapon.

We don't have much of anything which you'd call Neanderthal art work or images of actual Neanderthals. Nonetheless this is a recent (Jay Matternes)reconstruction:

and certain statues from the Indus Valley civilization show a remarkable similarity:

And then you get to Gunnar Heinsohn's "Wie Alt ist das Menschengeschlect" and his description of the problem with the manner in which Neanderthal stratigraphies have been interpreted:

"Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).

The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows

* modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
* Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)
* Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).

In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000.

Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.

I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.

There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.

I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:

* -600 onwards Iron Age
* -900 onwards Bronze Age
* -1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
* -1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
* between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.

Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:
* monostrat.: only modern man's tools
* interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side
* monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools
* interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side
* monotstrat.: only Erectus tools
* (deepest stratum for intelligent man)

The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critics that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism."

Note that Heinsohn is essentially providing maximal age figures which stratigraphic evidence could actually support. That is not exactly the same thing as claiming that neanderthals arose a couple of thousand years before Christ but when you combine this picture with the dinosaur petroglyphs and the images from Harappa and Mohenjo Dara, then you begin to comprehend that the time for us to be descended from hominids is simply not there, and the claims of us and hominids having any sort of a common ancestor 700,000 years back are basically ridiculous

[blam]

Don’t ping me any more. Thanks.

[PapaBear3625]

There’s an old Texas saying, something to the effect that you can’t teach a pig to sing - pigs can’t sing and it just irritates them. Probably doesn’t translate well outside of rural Texas.

The version I heard: "Never try to teach a pig to sing -- it wastes your time and it annoys the pig".

[SuzyQue]

That one makes more sense. :)

[BroJoeK]

wendy1946: "That is also BS on numerous levels, not the least being the question of whether our planet is even one million years old."

Oh, speaking of BS -- I take it the rest of your post here is an effort to demonstrate that the earth is less than one million years old? So we are back to basic basics...

Evidence supporting the 4.3 billion year age of the earth is all around us -- we see it every day, driving down the road are cuts through hillsides showing us dozens or hundreds of stratigraphic levels.
In some parts of the country you can see veins of coal amongst them.
These veins alone took many millions of years to form.

But the earth itself is 15 times older than those veins of coal.

• We begin to see this by simply digging down below the coal veins -- miles and miles into the earth, one level below the other, thousands of stratigraphic levels adding up to many hundreds of millions of years.

• Other ways we know this include dozens of different types of radiometric dating, beginning with carbon-14 which is good back to about 50,000 years ago.
  Here is a listing of about two dozen other radiometric dating methods, each valid for different time periods, with considerable overlaps.
  Some of these can take us back to the beginning of the solar system, 4.3 billion years ago.

• Another way of confirming time scales for the age of the earth is to look back in time towards the beginnings of the Universe -- with telescopes.
  Astronomical calculations show the beginnings of the Universe well over 10 billion years ago. So a solar system about 4.5 billion years old makes sense.

wendy1946: "Robert Bass, actually redid Lord Kelvin's heat equations for the planet WITH a maximal figure for radioactive materials, and got an outer bound of around 200M years,"

Well, 200 million years is still way more than Lord Kelvin's 20 million years, not to mention your one million years, so at least Robert Bass is moving in the right direction.

• In terms of geology and paleontology, 200 million years takes us back to the late Triassic, early Jurassic, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and our little mammal ancestors hid in the ground and trees, sneaking out at night to find insects. ;-)

• But 200 million years is off by a factor of 20, and we can start to see that by simply digging down below the levels of the Jurassic and Triassic to what came before.

• No doubt Bass's calculations are flawed somehow, though exactly how it would take a serious scientist to explain.
  I would simply point to the fact that it is an outlier result, amongst many others which indicate older dates.

wendy1946: "The people claiming these "common ancestors(TM)" for us and Neanderthals are generally the same people still claiming a 60M year antiquity for dinosaurs DESPITE all the new evidence of meat, blood cells, blood vessels, skin cells and what not turning up in dinosaur remains as well as the one nearly complete hadrosaur..."

Of course, there were no dinosaurs 60 million years ago.

• Dinosaurs were killed off in a mass extinction 65 million years ago.

• And fossil remains of dinosaurs very rarely include small bits of organic material (no DNA), whose survival over the ages must be counted something of a miracle.

• Sadly, for those skeptics who don't believe in miracles, these very rare and tiny bits of organic material lead to other strange conclusions.

• "The one nearly complete hadrosaur" you mention was amazingly well preserved, but included no organic material.

wendy1946: "Note that Heinsohn is essentially providing maximal age figures which stratigraphic evidence could actually support.
That is not exactly the same thing as claiming that neanderthals arose a couple of thousand years before Christ but when you combine this picture with the dinosaur petroglyphs and the images from Harappa and Mohenjo Dara, then you begin to comprehend that the time for us to be descended from hominids is simply not there, and the claims of us and hominids having any sort of a common ancestor 700,000 years back are basically ridiculous."

Ridiculous?
Bass calculated 200 million years.
How does that not leave enough time for the descent of humans from pre-humans?

As for the entirety of pre-human history, I count nearly two dozen different ancestral groups:

[wendy1946]

That IS what we’ve been taught most of our lives...

[wendy1946]

Dinosaurs were killed off in a mass extinction 65 million years ago.

The most obvious problem...

[BroJoeK]

Wendy1946: "The most obvious problem:"

Here is a general discussion on these so-called Dinosaur "soft tissues."

Note this remarks:

"The presumed soft tissue was called into question by Thomas Kaye of the University of Washington and his co-authors in 2008.
They contend that what was really inside the tyrannosaur bone was slimy biofilm created by bacteria that coated the voids once occupied by blood vessels and cells.[61]
The researchers found that what previously had been identified as remnants of blood cells, because of the presence of iron, were actually framboids, microscopic mineral spheres bearing iron.
They found similar spheres in a variety of other fossils from various periods, including an ammonite.
In the ammonite they found the spheres in a place where the iron they contain could not have had any relationship to the presence of blood."

Point is: even the existence of "soft tissues" is not proved scientifically, nor has a process been demonstrated to account for it. Nor has any DNA been extracted to prove or disprove what organism the "tissue" came from.

Most important, it has not even been seriously suggested that genuine tissues surviving so long would somehow disrupt our best understandings of the ages of the stratographic levels in which those fossils were found.

[wendy1946]

Worthless source, worthless analysis, no surprise..

Some of the tyrannosaur blood cells have been found INSIDE bones, and the possibility of that material being contaminated by extraneous iron is ZERO. Exhaustive studies in the last year have demonstrated conclusively that the soft tissue finds are real, and there is ZERO possibility of any of that stuff surviving 65,000,000 years.

ICR take on the subject

Apologetics Press' take.

Hadrosaur soft tissue article.

[MetaThought]

It is very convenient to ignore the references in the wiki. Since all other sources are “worthless”, ICR is of course, the only source that matters.

[wendy1946]

Wikipedia is a known quantity. It is wonderfully useful for any sort of thing for which no controversy could plausibly exist, e.g. how does a two-stroke diesel engine work?, where is the city of Gdansk and how many people live there?, when did Marco Polo visit China etc. etc. etc.

For anything such as the present topic which involves major controversies, Wiki is totally worthless.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Again, neanderthal DNA is described as halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee.

You know that repeating mis-information does not make it true, right?

[wendy1946]

"The researchers found that what previously had been identified as remnants of blood cells, because of the presence of iron, were actually framboids, microscopic mineral spheres bearing iron."

I mean, the real question is how do iron particles create the blood vessels which were also seen in the samples???

Smithsonian article:

Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.” Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html#ixzz0o95cc6e5

See what I mean about wikipedia? I mean, Jesus could come again and turn all the junk in every junkyard in America into gold for a sign and a the same wiki-weenies who erased the 5000 articles about the midieval climate optimum would be claiming it was a hoax.

[MetaThought]

Do you understand the concept of references ? Even wikipedia can have good references.

[MetaThought]

http://newswise.com/articles/view/542898/

The researchers found that what previously had been identified as remnants of blood cells, because of the presence of iron, were actually structures called framboids, microscopic mineral spheres bearing iron. They found similar spheres in a variety of other fossils from various time periods, including an extinct sea creature called an ammonite. In the ammonite they found the spheres in a place where the iron they contain could not have had any relationship to the presence of blood.

"We determined that these structures were too common to be exceptionally preserved tissue. We realized it couldn't be a one-time exceptional preservation," Kaye said.

The scientists also dissolved bone in acid, as had been done previously, and found the same soft tissue structures. They conducted a comparison using infrared mass spectroscopy and determined the structures were more closely related to modern biofilm than modern collagen, extracellular proteins associated with bone. Carbon dating placed the origin at around 1960.

[wendy1946]

An exhaustive study of this thing was done in 09 and the claim of soft tissue and blood vessels and blood held up. Neither you nor anybody at talk.origins or wikipedia is going to make that go away by waving your hands like that.

[wendy1946]

wiki-answers...

"As commented on by Schweitzer the soft tissue contained blood vessels out of which a liquid substance was able to be squeezed. When tested this was able to be identified as blood - possessing both the shape of red corpuscles under the miscoscope and the appropriate reaction to a magnetic field due to the iron in the haemoglobin. "

I mean, the evolosers can't even really get to everything connected to wikipedia itself despite their efforts. The article says a lot about creationists none of it positive, but at least they don't dispute the facts of the case as the altogether ignorant article quoted above does.

[wendy1946]

Per your post 66 above...

How much of the rest of the stuff you were taught as a child do you still believe in? The Easter Rabbit? the Tooth Fairy? Santa Claus??

[colorado tanker]

Food fight!