Posted on 12/31/2002 4:38:20 PM PST by Pharmboy
Exactly so. Without more specimens, it's hard to really make any kind of firm inference about the true average size of Homo erectus. What we do know is that there were some reasonably sizeable members of that group, so it's not hard to imagine that the average could have tended more towards the high end of the specimens we have found. And since Homo erectus undoubtedly lived in multiple places, comprising multiple populations, I would expect a certain amount of regional variation in size, based on the relative availability of a nutritional food supply.
Indeed, there's a pretty good analogue to that kind of thing here in the modern world. For many centuries now, the Japanese diet has been heavily based on things like fish and rice, with the result that, traditionally, the Japanese have tended to be noticeably shorter than their Western counterparts, who have a diet heavier on relatively high-calorie, high-fat foods - pork, beef, eggs, milk, cheese, and so forth. But as Japanese children gradually shift to a more Western diet of burgers and pizza and the like, they are increasing in average height as well, away from the 5'6" or so of older Japanese men, and towards the 5'9" or so of Western men.
That apelike rib cage is a real kicker. That's a piece of the puzzle I was not aware of until now. That alone would probably make a neanderthal so ugly to one of ourselves as to preclude dating or anything like that.
How do you reconcile that with your "low gravity" theory, Ted? If gravity were truly lower then, the chronological sequence of the skeletons should be reversed.
If CroMag had a distinct advantage as a hunter (eg, verbal abilities that made it easier to coordinate a group of hunters bringing down large game -- which is not easy to do if all you've got is spears and thrown rocks), he could strip a Neandethal hunting territory of game in short order. They wouldn't have to come into direct conflict with each other -- one would be able to survive in an area that the other would starve in
And 2) IMHO their disappearance was too swift even for your scenario.
Skuhl 5 is an adult. That West Asia link mentions a number of specimens with overlapping and intermediate features.
As I see it, the preponderence of evidence including the DNA studies, Shreeve's article, and Gunnar Heinsohn's comments indicate that neanderthals were the human type antecedant to us, and that the changeover was rapid and driven by design change of some sort rather than evolution.
We know for sure that it's more complicated than that. In much of the Near East, neanderthals replaced more modern-looking humans for a long time. Your simplistic Intelligent-Designer "Shazaam!" version doesn't allow or account for that.
Yup. I've read those too. I think we're missing something with the DNA. I think we are Neanderthal.
Somewhere back up the thread, someone has a link to the modern/Neanderthal hybrid child found in either Spain or Portugal.
Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female's reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are "white." Consider James Cook's voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. "Cook's men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges," archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. "God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn't stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets."Your author notes:Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how "strange" they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn't there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least "Neanderthalish" among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a "Neandermod" lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.
In contrast, Neanderthals had a short, stocky build like that of present-day inhabitants of cold regions (Pearson, 2000b: 240-241).
That strikes me funny in light of the reconstructed skeleton shown in this thread. I suspect something like "short, stocky build like that of an ape" would be a bit more like it.
I don't have all the answers on this one, but there are several thing I'd try to keep in mind. One is that Shreeve's article is well researched. If there was any crossbreeding between moderns and neanderthals at all which is doubtfull, there was a hell of a lot less of it than you'd expect. That in combination with the DNA studies pretty much rules out modern man descending from neanderthals and most scientists agree with that. The "shazaam" transition from neanderthal to modern does not rule out a possibly long period of coexistence afterwards. The images from Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, as I noted above, sort of point that way. Gunnar Heinsohn is on solid ground in his claims regarding stratigraphy. That combined with other analyses of dating methods in general throw a lot of doubt on many of the time frames you read about involving neanderthals. Finally, there is the question of Elaine Morgan's thesis and what if any implications that might have for neanderthals versus modern man.
Not always. Why do we have earlobes? There's no reason for them. They just appeared, and weren't fatal, so they're still with us. Same with eye color, hair texture, fingerprints, and probably lots of other inconsequential items. We've inherited a lot of stuff. Sometimes it's really advantageous, and that will tend to show up more and more in future generations, but sometimes it's just meaningless baggage.
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