A Rebuilt Neanderthal

The New York Times ^ | 12-31-02 | JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

[general_re]

One major error was to show it compared to modern (and by historic standards) gigantic man. The average French male from the 17th century was 5 feet 2 inches and weighed scarcely over 100 pounds.

Yet another way in which the French were inferior - I don't think that's necessarily a very good example of the historical size of H. sapiens. By way of a counterexample, the minimum height requirement for the Roman army - during the time they were stomping all over the Frenchman's inferior ancestors, no less - was 5'5" for the infantry, and 5'10" for cavalrymen. And they never had much trouble filling their ranks by the tens of thousands, suggesting that even if 5'5" was somewhat taller than average, it was hardly three standard deviations away from the mean, if you follow me.

Plus, if you assume human growth rates for the Turkana specimen, which is generally believed to have been about 11-12 years old, and around 5'3" at death, you wind up with an adult height in the neighborhood of 6'1". Which may or may not have been exceptionally tall for H. erectus, but when life is a competition, having a few exceptional individuals on your team can sometimes make a significant difference...

[fire_eye]

This is what the Times does better than anyone else. They are finally admitting that the most likely thing that doomed these squat hominids were our ancestors.

And it likely was not very pretty.

Actually, it may have been rather unremarkable.

I read a statistical observation by someone, who pointed out that if every time two populations encounter each other, one of them incurs a decrease in population relative to the other, it can be statistically proven (given equal reproductive rates on the part of the two species) that one of them will eventually become extinct. (It does seem sort of intuitively obvious...).

The point was that it would not have required open warfare and genocide by the Cro-Mags (damn good band, btw) of the Neanderthals - just one more dead Neanderthal per normalized time period than dead Cro-Mags, overall - a good maxim to keep in mind today, when pursuing the global extermination of Islam...

[Stavka2]

Go here for some really twisted thought patterns.

[PatrickHenry]

In truth, some physiologists cannot help but see physical differences in races and sub-races of people.

We had a thread recently which touched on this touchy subject. Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations . Check out post 42.

[Pharmboy]

Nope...don't buy the non-violent end to the Neanders for one reason: the rapidity of their disappearance from the Euro scene. They were there one minute and gone the next. Your gene-swapping theory could work if the timing were MUCH slower...

[stanz]

The leg proportions don't figure. Why do they both have similar-sized femurs while the tibias are much smaller in Neanderthal?

[stanz]

Old wisdom has it that since Neanderthals lived in ice-age climates, they needed more lung capacity (and nasal capacity)to take in more air than H. Sapiens. There must be references in the literature somewhere which discusses this.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I love Frank Frazetta's work. Nice pic.

I was captivated by his artwork the first time I saw Molly Hatchet's album cover.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Larger lung capacity? Perhaps even more than one stomach?

[titanmike]

One thing you won't read in science journals, is the problem these recent studies of neanderthals create for evolution and evolutionists.

Recent studies of neanderthal DNA turned up the result that neanderthal DNA is "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", and that there is no way we could interbreed with them or be descended from them via any process resembling evolution. That says that anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid, i.e. a plausible ancestor for modern man, and that the closer hominid would stand closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal, and that his works and remains should be very easy to find, since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map. Of course, no such closer hominid exists; all other hominids are much further from us than the neanderthal.

An evolutionist could try to claim that we and the neanderthal both are descended from some more remote ancestor 200,000 years ago, but that would be like claiming that dogs couldn't be descended from wolves, and must therefore be descended from fish, i.e. the claim would be idiotic.

That leaves three possibilities: modern man was created from scratch very recently, was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal, or was imported from elsewhere in the cosmos.

The idea of modern man evolving is not tenable.

Neanderthals used to be drawn and painted as ape-men. More recent scientific reconstructions show them to be closely related to us, but definitely another species as opposed to another race:

Jay Matternes' reconstructions of neanderthals.

[Eternal_Bear]

In the Sumerian Legend of Gilgamesh there is reference to creature not quite human but very similar to us. This being was called Enkidu and was a friend of Gilgamesh. While the story was transcribed only thousands of years ago, perhaps it conveys in it the last vestiges of an oral tradition that stretches back tens of thousands of years perhaps to a time when man interacted with the Neanderthals?

[MissAmericanPie]

You tell me.

[ALS]

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

The large nasal passage warmed the air.

[PatrickHenry]

The leg proportions don't figure. Why do they both have similar-sized femurs while the tibias are much smaller in Neanderthal?

It's not as if we're examining an aircraft or something else which has been deliberately designed. The Neanderthal legs were apparently adequate for survival, so their structure persevered through the generations. Eventually, nature's blundering system of mutation produced a better model -- our own wonderful selves -- and the days of the Neanderthal were numbered.

Our own "design" isn't exactly optimal. Lots of humans suffer from bad backs, dental problems, poor vision, allergies, etc. Very few of us are models of athletic perfection. But our species seems adequate for survival, so here we are. In due course, our technology may permit us to "improve" on our design. That should be interesting.

[MissAmericanPie]

There ya go, thanks, I have no idea what happened to my pic.

[VadeRetro]

The US generation that fought the Civil War seems to have been about as scrawny as those 17th century Frenchmen. It's no real wonder, since they were the real "sons of the pioneers." (Remember the name of Roy Rogers's backup singers?) The Civil War soldiers grew up marginally nourished on hardscrabble farms in the 1840s and 1850s at the peak of our westward expansion. They were visibly less well-fed than the soldiers of the Revolutionary War had been.

At different times in history, some human populations have been consistently well-fed. They usually managed to grow large in these cases. The Vikings at their peak seem to have eaten well and grown robust. The early settlers in North America were full of admiration for the physiques of the Mohawk warriors. Hawaiian royalty made being well-fed and large a status symbol. Some of them got quite impressive.

[titanmike]

You might not need to go back that far. Consider Jay Matternes' reconstruction of the neanderthal:

And then consider the sort of image which Sir Mortimer Wheeler called a "priest/king type" found in Indus Valley sites:

Notice any sort of a resemblence?

[Centurion2000]

bump ... interesting

[ALS]

The site it was on doesn't allow images to be viewed outside their domain.