[Red Badger]

Well, DUH!..................

[Tamar1973]

Redhead PING!

[G8 Diplomat]

Well why wouldn’t there have been redheaded Neanderthals? Red hair is just a mutation of the genes that code for hair color, it’s not like it couldn’t have happened way back then.

[wagglebee]

Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun

[docbnj]

This might be very interesting. Red hair and light skin go together. The adaptation appears to be related to life at high latitudes, such as Europe. It allows the skin more effectively to synthesize Vitamin D, particularly if much of the body is covered with clothing because of the cold.

I suspect that Neanderthals and modern humans were able to interbreed, but there is no longer any way to test this hypothesis by the usual means. If the two groups could not interbreed, and the Neanderthals and modern humans independently developed light skin for life in foggy, cold, northern latitudes, this would be a case of parallel evolution.

Of course, if you still think that the Earth and the whole Universe were formed in 4,004 BC, you will have trouble making sense out of all this.

Not all cave men were Neanderthals. The men who painted the fine pictures on the walls of the caves in southern France and northern Spain were Cro Magnon, which is a racial type of modern men. There is good evidence that they have left modern descendants.

The Neanderthals, on the other hand, were heavier-boned than modern humans, and had skull characteristics which would be very distinctive. They probably were muscular enough to be able to make short work of even our most grisly looking, steroid-enhanced pro-wrestlers. So why did the Neanderthals die out?

Perhaps global warming got them! ;-)

[johnny7]

[blam]

National Geographic Society version"

Some Neandertals Were Pale Redheads, DNA Suggests

[ApplegateRanch]

To ensure that the MC1R point mutation was not due to contamination from modern humans, the scientists checked some 3,700 people, including those previously sequenced for the gene as well as everyone involved in the excavation and genetic analysis of the two Neanderthals. None showed the mutation, suggesting that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens followed different evolutionary paths to the same redheaded appearance.

Did they check The Librarian at Unseen Universty?

[VOA]

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