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 ...
I had not given that much thought before, but I am sure you have it exactly right. Maybe you need a chapter about "Genes Run Wild."
Hmm.. Or maybe it was the Latin part. The Brits were probably at least as much Latin as they were Celtic by the time the Angles and Saxons came along. By the time the Normans made it over they were totally mutts. :)
Ya, it has been written before that the Latin did them in, genetically speaking, and well culturally. They lost their Teutonic virtu. Hitler probably read some of that stuff.
ohmigod! You just killed the thread. meh.. It was overdue..
My light touch button was accidentally missed (the one I almost always use), and the nuke button was hit.
very interesting link in post 39
The heliocentric model was first recorded by Aristarchus of Samos in ancient Greece. It's written on by Aristotle, Archimides, and Plutarch, among others. It was Ptolemy's embrace of a geometric model that created a discontinuity between Aristarchus and Copernicus.
I bundle the Age of Enlightenment, along with Isaac Newton, in with the Industrial Revolution. They are parts of the same phenomenon in my view.
PS. But it was the Industrial Revolution that ultimately catapulted Europe to global hegemony. The rest is ultimately just prep-work.
That should be geocentric model, not geometric model (though it is geometric fwiw).
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