Posted on 08/13/2006 4:11:37 PM PDT by blam
Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did
By Faye Flam
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Though it's been 150 years since mysteriously humanlike bones first turned up in Germany's Neander Valley, the find continues to shake our collective sense of human identity.
Neanderthals are humanity's closest relatives, with brains at least as big as ours, and yet we don't know whether we should include them as members of our own species.
No longer does science consider them our direct ancestors but some suspect Neanderthals and modern homo Sapiens interbred during the 20,000 some-odd years we co-existed in Europe. The archaeological record doesn't tell us one way or another, but earlier, researchers announced they would seek more clues by scraping DNA from Neanderthal bones and teeth.
The question of sex with Neanderthals speaks to our understanding of ourselves, our origins and our uniqueness. If this other type of human being wasn't like us, what was he like?
As I started researching this issue, I found myself staring at a picture of a nude Neanderthal man — a forensic sculpture created by Duke University paleoanthropologist Steve Churchill that was published last year in the journal Science. The model, based on a skeleton found at La Ferrassie in France, is mesmerizing in its combination of familiarity and alienness.
To be honest, he's really not half bad looking. He's got a good, muscular body, and while he's nobody's idea of handsome, that could be forgiven if he had a nice personality or I was starving and he offered to throw some rhino steaks on the fire for me.
We're not talking about the stoop-shouldered, hairy, apelike Neanderthal of popular culture. There's no evidence they were hairier than modern people, says anthropologist Harold Dibble, a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
GGG Ping.
But I don't drink anymore....
Well Ayla did. But what good did it do?
I've dated a few
Now, now, they are talkng about sleeping with a cavewoman. Not Helen Thomas.
Please note I created two opportunities to post pictures. Don't let me down.
L
Things have gone seriesly downhill...
There is no evidence presented in this article to support the title. None whatsoever. Quite to the contrary, the article falsely proclaims: "The archaeological record doesn't tell us one way or another.." In actuality, this article is completely divorced from the most recent research, which points exclusively in the opposite direction: That modern humans did not interbreed with Neanderthal.
I had a girl friend from New Jersey!
Oh, GROSS!!!
I am trying to eat dinner, here!!
:P
I may have to hit abuse....
This might explain who Cain slept with after he took off after killing Able.
Ok, OK, I was really desperate. Now will you just shut up about this?
Serious question - I've always been curious as to how one reconciles this with the biblical version of the origins of man..
That may be but you have not seen my Brother in Law.
Besides I think it was proven that by the mear existence of the French it proved that the Mongrel's breed with goats and pigs of eastern Europe.
From what I see walking around, some "women" still do!
Ugh! Don't you have something better to think about meditating in silence on your mountain top?
That leaves no plausible evolutionary antecedant for modern man on this planet.
These two guys bring new meaning to the term "homo sapeins."
sapiens.
You missed Cro Magnon man.
dang! another keyboard ruined!
I think this is true, and we should continue the trend. I want to breed a new race of half-gorrilla men to let loose on the Middle East
In fact there was always a big mystery as to why there was zero evidence of crossbreeding despite the two groups living in close proximity for long periods of time. The DNA studies pretty much resolved the mystery. WE could no more interbreed with neanderthals than we could with horses. Moreover, doing it with a neanderthal would not be that much different than doing it with an ape.
This explains where Democrats came from.
oh, puLLEEZE, anything to deny the existence of God..anything to duhumanize, anything to make us more LIKE MONKEYS.
"Even when unfamiliar groups label each other as subhuman, they almost always have sex anyway."
And it invariably changes someone's luck.
Cro-magnon was a modern man, no different from us.
These are ancient humans, not monkeys.
I thought we weren't going to talk about that...
Neander-Tall porno ping
ROFL!
You're too late. They are already there.
Yeah, as if Faye Flam has much to bargain with..
Just to reiterate a couple points I made in that other thread of BS conjecture and fantasies that I commented at length on, we do not find mixed communities in the fossil record. Moreover, we have no idea what level of communication Neanderthals might muster, but it is absolutely safe to say that if they spoke any language it was not the language of contemporary Cro-Magnons. In other words, it's not altogether clear how Ms Flam would even communicate her desire to put out for some rhino steaks.
Furthermore, we have no way to know what the Neanderthal disposition might've been like. Ms. Flam seems to think it matters more whether she would have sex with Mr. Neanderthal than it matters whether he would have sex with her. Moreover, what makes Ms. Flam assume that Mr. Neanderthal would think her putting out was worth giving up a rhino steak for? Hell, I can see right now that I wouldn't give up a rhino steak for that.
Anyhow, I could go on and on and on. The problem here is that it's so easy to 'humanize' Neanderthals so that they're nothing more than slightly mishapen Cro-Magnons in the popular imagination, but the truth is that we know nothing at all about their personality or whatever passed for culture among them, much less about their sexual disposition. But the fact of the matter is that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthal by all evidence were separated by hundreds of thousands of years of divergent evolution, and that neither modern nor fossil DNA evidence has turned up any sign of interbreeding.
Yeah, well, next time maybe do a little research!
"As I started researching this issue, I found myself staring at a picture of a nude Neanderthal man..."
Too much information!
Y'all make this seem like a bad thing...
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