Milford H. Wolpoff (My guy)
But what if you can interbreed, but don't want to. What if most neanderthals were unappealing to spaiens sapiens? Techically, even if they could interbreed, they didn't. So the evolutionary results are the same as IF they were different species.
In that case, I think it is actually safe to classify them as seperate species.
Most of the population of modern China owes its genetic origins to Africa, an international scientific team reports in research that undercuts any claim that modern humans may have originated independently in China.
In the search for human origins, in which political beliefs and pride of place can figure as much as fossil evidence, the new genetic findings dramatically illustrate the intricate weave of prehistoric migrations and human evolution, the scientists said.
The researchers also demonstrated that the peoples of northern and southern China cluster into distinct regional genetic populations that share inherited characteristics. Those groups, in turn, can be divided into even smaller, separate genetic groups. Yet, overall, they all are descendants of a single population group that may have migrated into China eons before humans learned to write or forge metal tools, the new research suggests.
Published in today's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the product of the Chinese Human Genome Diversity Project, a consortium of seven major research groups in the People's Republic of China, and the Human Genetics Center at the University of Texas at Houston. It was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The group used the advanced tools of DNA analysis to create detailed genetic profiles of 28 of China's official population groups, which make up more than 90 percent of the country's population, to try to understand the roots of complex chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.
By exploring the genetic relationships among China's ethnic groups, the team also shed light on the ancestry of people in East Asia, who, like everyone, carry in every cell of their bodies genetic hints to their evolutionary history and the journeys of their forebears.
In all, the Chinese government today recognizes 56 ethnic groups. Just one of them, the Han, makes up the bulk of the population, comprising about 1.1 billion people. The 55 other ethnic minority groups encompass about 100 million people.
To study the diverse genetic inheritance of such an enormous population, the researchers used a special set of genetic markers called microsatellites. These extremely short chemical segments of DNA mutate very rapidly. That lets scientists use them as signposts to mark how populations diverged or merged over time, reconstructing their evolutionary journey across time and the continents to their present homes.
The scientists looked at 30 such microsatellite markers across 28 of the population groups in China and compared the pattern to 11 other population groups around the world.
"Populations from East Asia always derived from a single lineage, indicating the single origins of those populations," they said. "It is now probably safe to conclude that modern humans originating in Africa constitute the majority of the current gene pool in East Asia," they said.
While few scholars today dispute the idea that the earliest ancestors of the human species evolved in Africa, there still is considerable debate over how modern humanity evolved from its more primitive ancestors.
Many anthropologists believe humans may have migrated out of Africa in waves. More than a million years ago, humanity's primitive ancestors, known as Homo erectus, walked out of Africa to colonize Europe, the Middle East and Asia. On that everyone agrees.
Then several hundred thousand years later, some theorize, a second wave of more sophisticated tool-using humans migrated out of Africa and overwhelmed those earlier ancestors. By that theory, modern humans are descended only from those sophisticated tool-users.
Other researchers dispute that pattern. In their view, there was no second wave of migration from Africa. Instead, they believe, humankind evolved in China and elsewhere as colonies of more primitive Homo erectus intermarried in a global network of genetic relationships.
"The issue," said University of Michigan anthropologist Milford Wilpoff, "is about whether people have multiple ancestors from many places or one ancestor from one place."
As much as I understand the PC imperative of an Academic and his detestation of all things violent; and I know how wonderful is his theory that the ancients "likely interbred and evolved together" - "made love," as it were, it is more likely that the opposite occurred: They "made war" and the Cro-magnons wiped out the more dim-witted Neanderthals.
Academics never quite give up their agenda, even as it is contradicted by their own research.
(2002-01-01) Conservatives, Darwin & Design: An Exchange
(2002-01-01) Design Yes, Intelligent No
(2002-01-01) Intelligent Design As a Theory of Technological Evolution
(2002-01-07) Genetic Marker Tells Squash Domestication Story
(2002-01-07) SNPs as Windows on Evolution
(2002-01-07) Supreme Court Won't Hear Case on Teaching Evolution
(2002-01-07) Universe Of Life: Maybe Not, A
(2002-01-07) What Every Theologian Should Know about Creation, Evolution, and Design
(2002-01-08) Universe Might Last Forever, Astronomers Say, but Life Might Not, The
(2002-01-09) Life On Other Planets? Vatican Aide Ponders The Possibility
(2002-01-10) Study: Neanderthals, Modern Humans Same Species
"Because she was too damn ugly to kiss goodbye."
This is essentially what happened to the Neanderthals.
The men couldn't bear to kiss their wives good-by when they went on hunting forays, so they took them along.
Some sexually deprived Cro-Magnon males spotted them and used the grocery sacks they always carried to allow them to interbreed without regurgitating.
The article specifically mentions the levant as the place where interbreeding would be expected, but never happened. With the DNA studies of the last few years, we now know why.
Shreeve's articl 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.
The fact that we are not descended from neanderthals totally kills the theory of evolution as far as any notion of modern man evolving goes. To believe that modern man evolved, you would now need to come up with a plausible ancestor, some closer hominid THAN the neanderthal and, since neanderthal remains and works are plentiful and this closer hominid would have to stand closer to us in both time and morphology, his works and remains would be all over the place IF he had ever existed. In actual fact, no such thing has been found. All other hominids are much further removed from us THAN the neanderthal.
Milford H. Wolpoff (My guy)
The European History in Verse by Annalex?A Neanderthal hunter in Brussels
Had developed superior muscles
Then a princess in Munich
Learned to dance from a eunuch
While the Brits produced Darwins and Russels
If _ever_ two threads deserved to be cross-linked, it's this one and this one: Begala and Carville on IMUS Now, 7:30 Eastern
Mark W.
But, what I really find amusing is when people, especially women, use "Neanderthal!" as an epithet against men, perhaps forgetting, or perhaps not realizing in the first place, that half of all Neanderthals were women.
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