This Is A Neanderthal.

[norseman]

Well the reason why we actually do know so much today is because some sensible people started ignoring the unthinking dogmas of the day and began to look at the world with a scientific eye. Hence why we now know what Neanderthals looked like to a very accurate degree. Thank goodness for the scientific method.

Stan ? Your awesome!

[Guest Stan Norton]

Junk Science, (which is in no short supply these days)

IMO, it isn't the scientific method that's faulty rather, some of the practioners methods which usually produces the aforementioned, junk science.

Got affluenza?

Nope. I live in Austerity Britain, work in the public sector and have kids. No affluenza here.

You a baby boomer? You spend all the money and use all the stuff?

[JDL]

The flap over conflicting viewpoints regarding Neanderthal cannibalism illustrates that the data is open to interpretation and argument.

 

Within these sciences, we must keep in mind that we are always operating based on the latest set of informed guesses.  Newly discovered information always results in new questions, and new forensic techniques still have a degree of imprecision. 

 

How much variance is required to makes us different from chimps?  Just 1.6%, right?  As persistent as this meme is, even this has since been challenged, https://answersingenesis.org/genetics/dna-similarities/greater-than-98-chimphuman-dna-similarity-not-any-more/.  There are also articles stating that modern human DNA contains 1% - 4%, or up to 20% Neanderthal DNA.  Your choice until someone reconciles the diverging viewpoints, perhaps by stating that one population of modern humans has the lesser amount and another the greater amount. 

 

And the Neanderthal depiction in the OP indicates that anthropomorphism is, indeed, in play in that the eyes do not reflect the obvious morphology of the underlying skull.

 

I respect Stan's faith in his profession, but assert that transient and serial fallibility is inherent in science.

[Doc Holliday]

agreed JDL, +1 on that and the point earlier about funding.

 

funny thing is the next group of "sensible people" will probably come along in a few years with another differing view , making this Neanderthal theory obsolete as well.

 

that's the irony of such discussions...... iron fisted support of todays theories while admitting those of yesterday were wrong even though the proper scientific methods supposedly were applied each time leading to   a new set of "facts", then presenting the old facts as fiction.....

 

got to love the  proclaiming of hypothesis as cold hard fact when in reality they don't have much more than guess from a clue.

[Guest Stan Norton]

I do believe that my initial point was that we actually do know, without any doubt, that Neanderthals are a human species. Not a cat eyed hairy grunting sex pest. This has been deduced through decades of research and, shock horror!, new theories and hypotheses being put forward. I'm not arguing for one minute that science isn't in a perpetual state of flux but I would respectfully ask that you don't use that as a reason to then infer that science's latest high tide mark is wrong and that cat eye sex man is right. I'm all for bucking the trend but not just because 'it's the system man'. 

 

Neanderthal eyes were not overly large by the way. Don't get carried away.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Stan Norton

[JDL]

I hope I didn't suggest somehow that Neanderthals were not a human species.  It is clear that they could interbreed with us.  I simply objected to the interpretation of their appearance as indistinguishable from homo sapiens.

[Guest Stan Norton]

Who said they were indistinguishable? I didn't. They were small, tough, clever and built for hard knocks, but they were most certainly human and not so very different from us at all. And they lasted over 200,000 years!

[JDL]

Agree with all that, but they certainly had bigger eyes with a different mid-line than we do.  This would be a definite distinguishing feature of their species.

[Guest]

So there is no push to humanize Neanderthals in response to the perception that the public will be more inclined to fund Neanderthal research, either directly or indirectly, if they perceive neanderthals to be more like them?

 

Such a push is not needed, as Neandertals are our closest known contemporaneous relatives.  Our closest existing relatives are chimpanzees (or bonobos), and humanizing them has not been necessary to fund a lot of research on them.  Neandertals, and now Denisovans, were closer relatives than are the species of Pan.  Thus, there will be plenty of funding for Neandertal and Denisovan research, regardless of how they looked or behaved.

[JDL]

Point, but chimp research is generally less expensive.

[georgerm]

Who said they were indistinguishable? I didn't. They were small, tough, clever and built for hard knocks, but they were most certainly human and not so very different from us at all. And they lasted over 200,000 years!

 

Living 200k years says something about being a successful species. I wonder if they were assimilated rather than becoming extinct?

 

It's interesting that Neanderthals were not that close to us even though their genome was 99.84 percent identical to us which in misleading when one looks at the epigenome.

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - How can creatures as different in body and mind as present-day humans and their extinct Neanderthal cousins be 99.84 percent identical genetically?

Four years after scientists discovered that the two species' genomes differ by a fraction of a percent, geneticists said on Thursday they have an explanation: the cellular equivalent of "on"/"off" switches that determine whether DNA is activated or not.............................................

Hundreds of Neanderthals' genes were turned off while the identical genes in today's humans are turned on, the international team announced in a paper published online in Science. They also found that hundreds of other genes were turned on in Neanderthals, but are off in people living todayThe discovery also underlines the power of those on/off patterns. Together, they add up to what is called the human epigenome, to distinguish it from the human genome. The genome is the sequence of 3 billion molecules that constitute all of a person's DNA while the epigenome is which bits of DNA are turned on or off even as the molecular sequence remains unchanged.

......................................."    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/18/dna-neanderthals-modern-humans-genes_n_5168730.html

 

 

[AaronD]

agreed JDL, +1 on that and the point earlier about funding.

 

funny thing is the next group of "sensible people" will probably come along in a few years with another differing view , making this Neanderthal theory obsolete as well.

 

that's the irony of such discussions...... iron fisted support of todays theories while admitting those of yesterday were wrong even though the proper scientific methods supposedly were applied each time leading to   a new set of "facts", then presenting the old facts as fiction.....

 

got to love the  proclaiming of hypothesis as cold hard fact when in reality they don't have much more than guess from a clue.

Science is only as infallible as the human conducting it

[Doc Holliday]

agreed, ^ +1.

[Guest]

Point, but chimp research is generally less expensive.

 

I'm not so sure.  There are many more chimps, so there is a lot more research.  To study them in their habitat requires extensive travel to remote locations, and to study them in a lab requires expensive housing for them.  There are no Neandertals these days, so one needed house them, and to study them in their habitat requires digging in the backyards of civilization where Eurasian universities are located.

 

Analyzing the chimp genome costs the same as analyzing the Neandertal genome -- maybe more, because chimp DNA is easier to obtain, so more analyses are done.

[JDL]

An IQ test can be biased.  I once took one that asked "Which of these foods is not a meat?"  The answer they were looking for was fish, which to me was the flesh of an animal, therefore meat.  So this test was biased toward those whose beliefs included the perception that fish is not meat.

 

Problem solving is the key factor.  If the test were skewed toward prospering in a more hostile environment requiring more self-sufficiency, then I suspect the map would look somewhat different.

 

The test is not apples to apples regardless of region.