How about "Alley Oop"
Posted on 12/31/2002 4:38:20 PM PST by Pharmboy
How about "Alley Oop"
The genetic studies so far have been based on mtDNA, which is almost purely matrilineal and probably not a good enough molecular clock for the purpose. (A nuclear DNA study would be nice, if a good-enough specimen is ever found.) Also, as this survey article indicates, the anatomical differences are far more pronounced in Europe than they are elsewhere, especially the Near East. There thus may have been a local "species gap" that didn't exist everywhere at once. The situation would have resembled modern ring species in birds and salamanders.
The main reason apes have such a chest? Let your imagination run wild...
This side-by-side graphic comparison is a prime example of the unprofessionalism that dominates the whole paleontologist dream factory.
What are the first "contrasts" that strike the eye?
1. The bone color. The modern is depicted as off-white, the neanderthal is decked in markedly different yellow. In other domains of human endeavor, this would be called "deceit."
2. Height. The neanderthal is depicted at 5'4", the modern as 6'0". Why 6'0"? Modern well-fed man has a wide range of heights, and in the centuries before the 20th, 5'4" was probably exactly average for a male. Again, these depictions are about dreams, foundation grants and reputations, not about facts.
Beyond this, the current variants of the human family are widely varied. Just go to the beach sometime in a racially diverse area and take note of the wide variation in "upper leg to lower leg" ratios or the differing pelvic structures of different races and nationalities. Combining this with the lack of actual Neanderthal material, this seems to be a report angling for more funding, nothing more.
Looks exactly like my boss, with no glasses or shirt.
I think most scientists agree that at some point you have to have been able to interbreed with something to have been descended from it. The curious total lack of any evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals is most problematical precisely in the levant in which moderns and neanderthals are known to have existed in close proximity for long periods of time and you'd figure interbreeding should have been very common IF it was possible.
James Shreeve's 1995 Discover Magazine article on the topic is apparently now being used in university courses in paleontology. You can get to the article by going to Discover Magazine's Search Page, clicking the Archive Search Engine, and searching on "Neanderthal Peace" for the year 1995.
Did anybody say Neanderthal?
One could just as easily define the different "races" of humanity as different "species"; it is an arbitrary term, the definition of which depends entirely on the assumptions and definitions that one starts out with in the first place. That's why evolutionary physchology is a more useful discipline for understanding the differences between human populations, because it takes into account the behaviours and group strategies that differentiate different human evolutionary groups, rather than obsessing over just the bare physical differnences between groups.
My own best guess as to the reality of the situation is that modern humans were somehow genetically re-engineered from neanderthals via some process which took no more than a few generations. Gunnar Heinsohn of the University of Bremen has noted that no realistic interpretation of stratigraphic evidence would assign any more than a couple of generations to the changeover from neanderthal to modern man:
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 critiques 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.
A curious statement. "The Levant" is exactly where the intergrading of human and Neanderthal features is most pronounced. Note the comments on the linked page regarding "Skhul V" specimen in particular. Then there's the Lagar Velho child from Portugal, which looks a lot like a human-neanderthal hybrid.
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