Europeans never had Neanderthal neighbors. Russian find suggests Neanderthals died out earlier.

Nature News ^ | 05/11/2011 | Ewen Callaway

[wastedyears]

A blow to evolution?

[Ciexyz]

Most interesting.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

The problem here would be why did the Neanderthals die out, without competition or aggression, from Homo Sapiens?

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

‘A blow to evolution?’

No.

[mountainlion]

The liberals will not like the idea that humans and Neanderthals did not have sex.

[Palter]

Esau

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

'Reich's team did not find any proof that Neanderthals ever mated with the ancestors of modern Europeans specifically. Yet Reich says that new, more sensitive methods for detecting interbreeding, as well as genome sequences from late Neanderthals could change that conclusion. "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence," he says.'

The key sentence "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence,"

[Inyo-Mono]

Interesting, but I have my doubts that they didn’t co-exist.

[Flag_This]

" The problem here would be why did the Neanderthals die out, without competition or aggression, from Homo Sapiens?"

Driven by concerns over rapidly dwindling ice sheets, Neanderthals set out to decrease Neanderthalgenic Global Warming by no longer using fire. The rest is history.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: A blow to evolution?

Not really a blow to evolution, just another change of historical guesses to “fit” the current evidence. Originally the theory was Homo sapiens lived side by side with Neanderthals and interbred with them and later, maybe even displaced or killed them.

Now this latest find suggests that humans didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there.

I guess the pertinent question is -— “Do we honestly think we understand the Human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? If so, in what ways?”

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

‘The liberals will not like the idea that humans and Neanderthals did not have sex.’

The article clearly states that ALL humans not residing in Africa are partially descended from Neanderthals. That means both me and you and most Freepers.

[Concho]

So, if humans came “up out of Africa”, and the Neanderthals were already in Europe, then where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

By George, you’ve got it!

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

‘where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?’

The current theory seems to be that they descended from Heidelberg Man, which arose in Africa more than half a million years before Homo Sapiens, and who had spread out of Africa at, very roughly, 500 thousand B.C.

[married21]

I guess it was inevitable that a guy named Heidelberg would end up in Europe.

[Concho]

So they were a distinctly separate group and migration way previous to “humans”. Wow, we are getting down to counting pretty fine threads. I was always led to believe that they wre just an earlier form of modern man~~ Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and modern man....

[Bernard Marx]

Good one! Clever.

[wendy1946]

The Basic Non Evolution of Modern Man

Crap about humans being related to any hominids other than via similar design remains crap no matter how often it is repeated. Neanderthal DNA was halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee; we could no more interbreed with them than we could with horses, and we are not descended from them, and all other hominids were FURTHER removed from us THAN the Neanderthal.

Too-far-removed-to-be-descended-from-via-evolution is a transitive relationship. There is nothing on this planet we could be descended from via any process resembling evolution.

[April Lexington]

Perhaps humans departing Africa encountered resident Neanderthals in the Middle East.

This is a joke, right?