Posted on 02/25/2006 5:11:22 AM PST by ThreePuttinDude
I wonder if there is an analogy here with Western Civilization and those adherents of 'The Religion of Peace'.
Red hair, green eyes, a gun.
Now although many of these different bird "species" have been shown to be capable of producing mixed offspring, they never do.
My point is that you shouldn't read too much into the skeletal similarities.
Not to go off on to much of a tangent, but the push of a button cannot run 15,000 years of advancement. That smacks of being raised on Armageddon thinking. Even a large nuclear war would not touch vast parts of human-inhabited Earth. Have you seen anyone having trouble rebuilding in or near Hiroshima and Nagasaki (much dirtier bombs, then)?
The knowledge of how to rebuild a modern Earth now lies distributed quite well around the world, on computer and backup media. Not to worry.
I just really don't find the arguments plausible myself. Those who argue that humans and Neanderthals interbred are reductionist in my opinion. People don't just sleep with anything that comes their way. Heck, most humans won't have sex with a rather large proportion of other humans. So, how did all this modern human / Neanderthal hanky panky take place?
We don't find mixed communities. If you conjecture rape, then who was raping whom? If modern humans raped Neanderthal females and then even if for some strange reason they kept the child that child would end up in the Neanderthal community. Whenever that Neanderthal community died out (as they all did) the intermixed genes would go with it.
And if the idea is that Neanderthals raped human females then you've got several problems. (a) You have to assume the human community survived, or else again the Neanderthal genes would not make it into the human gene pool. (b) Why would the humans raise a hybrid?
I already spoke to this. Even today there are women over in India and China right now who are killing their babies just because they're girls. Humans do not raise the offspring 'just because it's there' (we like to pretend that nowadays in our culture, but that's because we've internalized a bunch of socialization).
And if it wasn't rape, if it was willing, then where are the mixed communities? Why would humans *want* to mate with Neanderthals? *They were ugly.* I mean, really, really butt ugly. I can't think of anything that we'd actually need them for. And one more point that is often ignore: we have no idea what their speech capability was, but it's a good bet that it was very noticeably different than ours, and no doubt a separate language.
So, the idea here is that humans moved in - warlike, suspicious humans - found a group of Neanderthals, decided to get together, learn a second language, and sing kumbaya after sex??
Seems to me that we could use someone with at least a high school education to moderate this "discussion" which, in many ways, sounds like one might expect from primitives discovering some modern tool like say a calculator.
Has anybody ever heard of the notion of the "opposable thumb"?
Did'nt think so.
Or anything having to do with Human Intelligence?...like the concept of "object permanence"?
Better "tools" are thought to be reflections of more advanced mental development and manual skills.
Maybe we should find a primer on Anthropology?
(And learn how to use our SpellCheckers?
And for at least the first hour avoid references to "BrokeBack Mountain"?)
Neanderthals were never global. Their range was limited to Europe, which right there is a sign of their cognitive limitations by comparison to modern humans.
If human/Neanderthal hybridization occurred since humans eradicated the Neanderthals it would be more likely that the interbreeding Neanderthal stock would consist mostly of females (captured during warfare). If warfare was not significant, one might expect interbreeding with both sexes. It would be vanishingly unlikely that no Neanderthal females would interbreed in this situation.
I can't think of one scenario in which only Neanderthal males would interbreed.
All the evidence points towards no interbreeding.
From observation, foxes are are canines. But they aren't, and cannot breed with them.
>>>An example of ----dare I say the word????!!!--
EVOLUTION.>>>
That is not an example of evolution. Not that I don't believe in evolution, but that you think that a species making another species extinct is evolution? Not hardly.
alchohol?
This article is so good for showing that Rich, White Europeans conducted genocide against a primitive native people that live as one with nature. Conversely, based upon "Mellars claims the first modern humans arrived in the Balkans from Israel around 46,000 years ago, about 3,000 years earlier than thought," one can bring into note all of the anti-semitic rhetoric about the Jews destroying an existing society because of their greed to control land.
Oh, the bigots and politically correct can do so much with this.
Is carbon dating an exact science now?
I dunno why, but I have been in a seizure of typos for several days now. It's very unlike me, and starting to annoy me in a major way!
Not to be picky, but part of natural selection is the ability to defend against predators, from the microbial to the more complex.
Maybe, if you got enough beer....
My anthropological studies are limited to bars and such, y'know, the mating rituals of Homo Trailertrash, but the one constant I always see in my subjects of observation is that the girls, they all get prettier the nearer closing time is. And a lot of them could be classified as "Neanderthal".
LOL!
See, it has to do with root words - You say "Beer", I see "Bier". the former is the correct spelling in englisch, the latter in german.
I get confused. Mea Culpa.
That's a good question, how they vanished completely. I'm thinking it had to be a serious plague to which they were vulnerable while our guys were not. Maybe related to cannibalism.
Otherwise---such gradual marginalization that eventually they were left to small isolated areas where inbreeding and its nasty social dynamics did them in. I think they had some sort of culture that broke down, and that alone can kill off a community, no plague necessary.
Still the question remains, since 100% gone (after that successful long run) does seem awfully strange. It's just that we are thinking in terms of the "last man" among them, and actually we have to think of the last community. Once the "community" has collapsed, from a social unit to mere numbers of individuals (every man for himself), the process of extinction speeds up real good.
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