Why the Neanderthal had such huge eyes

But to be honest.... My degree never really has gotten me much. I'm more proud of the fact that I'd whoop your goddamn ass backwards sidewase and forward before you ever knew what hit you. Take that to the bank.

Who survived the last ice age - above ground, and below ground? Where?

Danny Vendramini had some good ideas and may have been close to the truth about Neanderthal appearance (God rest his soul) but to say that Homo Sapiens isn't descended from apes and hominids is just stupid.

Yeah, article is basically crap.

I wasn't trying to be an asshole to this guy. But I'd put a two piece on him real quick. We don't only read books in Louisiana. I'm sorry if I messed up the thread.

I'd book that motherfucker in a heart beat and beat him in an iq test. I'm a humble guy but he pushed me. Sorry gentlemen.

The idea of humans evolving from hominids is not tenable. For any hominid to have evolved into humans, that hominid would have to have:
• Lost his fur while ice ages were going on.
• Lost almost all of his night vision while living in the perpetual twilight of the “Purple Dawn” age and while surrounded by predators which could see very nicely in the dark.
• Lost almost all of his sense of smell while trying to survive as a land prey animal.

That third item would have been more or less instantly fatal for a land prey animal. Aquatic mammals, of course, do not really require a keen sense of smell…

Elaine Morgan's theory doesn't really work for our planet; there is no fossil evidence for it and there has never been a body of water on this planet which would be safe for humans to live in. It is the best theory of human adaptation which has ever been put forward, it simply needs a different kind of a world to happen on.

Likewise the idea that a small number of Neanderthal genes in some modern humans implies past interbreeding.



There is a claim that, because some humans have a certain small number of genes in common with Neanderthals, that humans and Neanderthals must have interbred. That amounts to thinking that a Neanderthal male could/would rape a woman and, rather than cooking and eating her afterwards as usual, somehow or other keep her alive long enough to bear a cross-species child, raise that child to reproductive age, and have him/her breed back into human populations without anybody catching on, i.e. the claim is ridiculous.

In real life:
• Neanderthal females would kill that woman the first time her new owner left her alone for ten minutes.
• The woman wouldn't fare any better than the subjects of the commie attempts to breed humans and apes into super workers in the 1930s.
• Humans would notice the child was different (really different...)
• And humans would kill that child and everybody else like him as part of the same program which killed out the Neanderthal. They would not need DNA tests to determine who to kill for that sort of reason, it would be exceedingly obvious.

The Neanderthal died out in a wave going from East to West as he encountered Cro Magnon humans with the last Neanderthal stand in Europe being in Southern Spain. There is just no way that humans who were conducting such a total genocide war would have tolerated half-breeds in their own midst. That is, even assuming that such cross-breeding was possible.

But what about the common genes you ask?? The claim (Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute) is that humans of Asian and European descent share a few genes with the Neanderthal, but that people of African descent do not.

There is a far more believable way in which a few hominid genes might have crossed over, which would be Cro Magnon war parties EATING dead neanderthals after some sort of a pitched battle and that only sounds stupid until you read up on it a bit:

Henry Gee in The Guardian:


"The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.

If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology...."

What you need to picture is some Cro Magnon war party traipsing around the Alps until somewhere around 4 PM they fight a pitched battle with a Neanderthal family group; those guys are cut, bleeding, dead tired, there are ten or twelve Neanderthals lying around dead, and one of the Cro Magnons says something like:

“Man, this has been a hell of a day! I’m so hungry I could eat just about anything and I’m way too tired to go off hunting right now, what the hell is there to eat around this place??”

You shouldn’t need to be Albert Einstein to figure out what those guys are eating that evening and, unless those early humans were to cook a Neanderthal very thoroughly, which is highly unlikely under the kinds of conditions which would have been in question, you'd still be talking about bacterial content and the possibility of bacterial insertion of genes.

never heard of this.

but I've read about the lack of real time processing that would had made every competition with sapiens impossible.

means they could not compute on the spot apart from instinct and took time to realize deadly situations.

and pretty much describe the kind of behavior of people who still have lot of neanderthal dna.

Danny Vendramini's reconstructions match up with everything we actually know about the Neanderthal.


• Neanderthal DNA was roughly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee. That eliminates any possibility of humans being descended from Neanderthals via any process resembling evolution.
• His skull was a very good match for an ape's profile, and a bad match for one of ours.
• No Neanderthal needles (Cro Magnon needles are common); a creature with a 6" ice-age fur coat simply doesn't require needles...
• Footprints more apelike than human.
• Rib cages were conical as are those of primates (to make room for the gigantic upper body musculature); our rib cages are cylindrical.
• Eye sockets and nasal areas much larger than ours. 
• Placement of noses and eyes on faces much different (higher) than for humans.
• We know that the mindset of the Neanderthal was similar to that of an African lion. He viewed the living world as neatly divided into two categories: his own family group and meat. Even other Neanderthal families were on the menu, and they find the remains of Neanderthal groups with clear butchering marks made by flint knives.
• We know (Rob Gargett) that if you put the skulls of a human, a Neanderthal, and lion together, the two which have much of anything in common are the Neanderthal and the lion.
• We know that Neanderthal population dynamics were similar to those of other predators, and that there were never more than around 10,000 – 15,000 Neanderthals alive on the planet at any one time.
• We know that the Neanderthal could adapt to an omnivorous diet when it was available but that, in the setting of the European ice age, he was for all intents and purposes a pure carnivore.
• We know that Neanderthals were not giants... a tall one might go 5-10 or 6'. But a male Neanderthal could easily have stood 5-9 and weighed 300 pounds with no extra weight on him.
• We know that the Neanderthal lacked the S curve in his lower spine, which allows humans to stand upright comfortably. Vendramini showing them in a crouched posture is almost certainly correct.

[link to images.app.goo.gl (secure)]

Fascinating!

So you literally are what you eat !?!

Those with higher Neanderthal DNA - I checked maps and lists - seem to be higher IQ populations IMHO

So smarter groups ATE more Neanderthals?

And passed those genetics down?

Hmmm and Hmmm

A new idea

Sky tells us when the next sun micro nova will hit

You shouldn't need to think too hard for this one. We share upwards of half our DNA with the banana... That has to be from eating bananas pretty much forever, not from having sex with bananas.

[link to www.google.com (secure)]

Neanderthals apparently were not on the menu in Africa, which is why you don't see Neanderthal DNA in African groups.

The first experience humans had with Neanderthals was watching friends and family members being killed and eaten by them. Eating a Neanderthal which had been killed in battle was just sending the Neanderthals a message in their own language.

On Facebook:

[link to www.facebook.com (secure)]