These two guys bring new meaning to the term "homo sapeins."
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 ...
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...
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