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Modern Humans, Neanderthals Shared Earth for 1,000 Years
joffley writes "ABC News is reporting on new evidence that has emerged suggesting Neanderthals co-existed with anatomically modern humans for at least 1,000 years in central France, before gradually disappearing about 28,000 to 30,000 years ago. But why did they disappear?"
Because the Flying Spaghetti Monster decided so.
they are still here...
huh?
Mebbe they weren't cross fertile (produced mules) and neanderthals had such a strong exogamy component, they died out trying too hard.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Well, everyone took a vote, and they got voted off the island.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
I think it's fairly easy to know where they went. Because they were "different" than modern humans, with lower technology levels, we simply killed them off for trying to take our resources. It's a no-brainer, because it's what we do as humans. We try to related but we destroy people who are not like us. Look at it as an early form of racism, and it's pretty straight forward. I'm not saying it's good, but at the time, we were equally as primative. We are still as primative, generally.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I kid, I kid.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
maybe the neanderthalls evolved, and modern humans were created by intelligent design?
by intellegent design, I of course mean Flying spahgetti monster.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From TFA: In short, the indicators point to the likelihood that Homo sapiens crushed or ousted the Neanderthals in the fight to survive. Why do we always need to reduce the possibilities to just these two? Isn't it equally likely that in the ebb and flow of occupation of the area humans eventually exhausted the resources that the Neanderthal relied upon, while being able to exploit other resources that the Neanderthal couldn't? Since 1,000 years is the overlap epoch it doesn't appear that a policy of active antipathy is at work.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
The Discovery channel ran a special recently about evolution and it offered similar information. Considering how long it takes to produce such a show, one would think this would have already made it's rounds around the internet.
As far as the question of why they are extinct, the show stated it as a matter of fact that homo sapiens simply over-ran their niche, as is prone to happen when two competing species inhabit the same environment.
I dunno if the show was pushing it's speculation as fact or if this source is out of date. It seems to make sense though. Smarter, team-working homo sapiens out-hunt the competition and the others starve.
Help a student gain some exp. http://www.halovariants.com/touchup/index.php
It's my understanding that the Neanderthals lived in caves located below sea level. A big storm came and wiped them all out.
What is the mechanism by which genes fade? I suggest that you take a basic biology class. Mitochrondrial DNA tests indicate that Neanderthals were an entirely seperate species with no interbreeding.Here's more on MtDNA highlight the discovery of Eve who lived 200,000 years ago.
Thalasar
There are two central issues. One is that the "Aurignacian" industry, which is proposed to have been made by modern humans, may not actually have been a single industry across Europe. In the current study, the "interleaving" of the two kinds of tools is documented by around 10 artifacts, out of 750 total.
The other issue is that no fossil remains of modern humans have yet been found associated with early "Aurignacian" tools. We simply don't know who made them. Since they are not technically very different from the Neandertal-associated Chatelperronian, it is hard to say that there is a real cognitive difference represented by those tools, whoever made them.
I have some pictures of the tools on my weblog post (John Hawks Anthropology Weblog), and conclude this:
--John
> *shrug* there doesn't have to be any evidence. but, that does mean it shouldn't be taught alongside evolution as an "alternate theory", just on the basis that there is no evidence.
Here are my favorite no-evidence theories that I want schoolkiddies to learn:
- Flying Spaghetti Monster Theory
- Intelligent Falling Theory
- Invisible Pink Unicorn Theory
- Last Thursday Theory
- 2+2=5 Theory
We've really got to quit letting the boring old farts set the agenda!Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually, this merely says that any Neanderthal ancestors we may have weren't through the pure-maternal line. It says nothing at all about the nuclear DNA, which is over 99% of our DNA.
True, however:
My guess is that we'll never have good enough evidence of Neanderthal genes to show that there was no interbreeding at all. That requires study of the entire genome, and the fossil record doesn't have to have preserved it for us.
No - there would be a distinctive signal we can detect purely from modern human genomes. Imagine that for gene X, 1% of Europeans have a Neandertal gene, and everyone else (including all non-Europeans) have the Sapiens gene. We sequence this gene from 10000 people, 1000 of whom are European, 10 of whom have the Neandertal gene. Those 10 Europeans have sequences which are similar to each other, but are much more different from the consensus than any other gene sequences - and most significantly, much more different than any of the African samples. (Africa being the homeland of Homo Sapiens means it has the largest genetic variability.)
Putting it another way: if we created a phylogenetic tree of the genes, we would observe some of the European genes being basal (separated from the bulk of the sequences by the first bifurcation on the tree), and by a large margin (after this bifurcation, there is a long time before the next bifurcation on the main branch.)
We haven't yet observed such a pattern, although I think people have looked. We may yet find this, but the longer we look without finding it, the less likely the interbreeding hypothesis becomes.
IAATMP. (I am a theoretical molecular phylogenist.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
From God's Roadmap:
Beta
Release version: Homo neanderthalensis
Build name: Adam
Release date: 4,569,770,000 years after cooling
Deprecated: 4,569,971,000 years after cooling
Stable
Release version: Homo sapiens
Build name: Eve
Release date: 4,569,800,000 years after cooling
Deprecated:
[Sigh] Still deciding. I mean, the codebase is starting to look a bit creaky in a few places, and they're starting to tinker with it themselves (they think it's open source - hah!). Inquisitive little so-and-so's can't leave well enough alone... They've noticed the legacy code from the previous build too - ick, some cruft in there. Very tempting to trash the lot and start again using AOP. Mind you I mightn't have to lift a finger if they don't stop blowing each other to smithereens.
[sigh] TODO: Take oort cloud inventory - look for something nice and big...
The fact of the matter is that Homo sapiens have been around for 200 THOUSAND YEARS!! Neanderthals were the dominant species for most of that time, until they died off approximated 30-35k ago ... it's not such a big leap to suggest that coexistence goes back to far earlier times, but the big deal about these caves is that the neanderthals were competing for the same resources as Homo sapiens, and were outhunted (the BIG mystery the article claims is unknown...you gotta love media) to extinction. Neanderthals used flake technology, while Homo sapiens used blade tech. Without going too heavily into it, Homo sapiens were killing up a storm with thrown spears and using prismatic cores and all that high tech jazz. Neanderthals still had to close in for the kill, and as such could not compete at all.
The important thing to understand is that there were two variants of hominids during the middle and upper paleolithic periods (assuming we disregard the Homo erectus groups off in Asia that were still hanging in there), rather than one being descended from the other. Neanderthals were adapted for the Ice Age, and were limited to Europe because of this. The highly adaptable (yet peabrained) little Homo sapiens spread like wildfire across the continents, killing as we went. Neanderthals are believed to have been very gentle and possibly even possessors of culture (although this is in constant debate), even taking care of the sick and wounded around them. One skull was even found with a hole beveled into it, suggesting some attempt at early surgical treatment (it was done premortem, and the individual lived for several years after the hole was made).
Whereas we were honed to kill.
Disclaimer: It's highly improbable that Homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens mingled, or that the Homo sapiens killed off the neanderthals. But until we can send a time machine back to record all this shit, nobody can be 100% certain.
Oh and A.C., I'm not making any corrections to what you've said, just trying to expand on it a bit. Seemed like as good a place as any. :) I agree about the communication, and how large Neanderthal brains were.
I'm sick of people touting Intelligent Design when they don't even understand Evolution.
Evolution is NOT about "random mutations". There is nothing at all RANDOM about evolution. Sure, there are random mutations going on all the time, but that's not what evolution is about. Evolution is about NATURAL SELECTION which is definitely NOT a random process.
There is a very specific rule that is applied to the "random mutations" to see which ones move forward and that is (more or less) this: Those mutations that tend to make a creature at least slightly more successful will tend to spread throughout a population. And "successful" means (essentially) living long enough to reproduce and raise young.
This is NOT random at all. Most (nearly all) mutations are either BAD and cause damage, or effectively do nothing. Only a few rare mutations actually pass the natural selection test of being positive and therefore spread through successive generations.
In a given context a mutation is either going to tend to be helpful to the survival of the creature or not. So I say once again Evolution is NOT random.
I could go on and on and explain how natural selection often leads to results that APPEAR to look "planned", even though they were not planned with any intelligent forethought, but that would be a whole book. Instead, read Richard Dawkins "The Blind Watchmaker".