End of the Neanderthal Myth?

Sept 23, 2008 — A grim Neanderthal face stares out from the cover of the October 2008 National Geographic Magazine. Coinciding with the cover story is a TV special, Neanderthal Code, about the Neanderthal genome. Both are replete with the magazines artistic arsenal aimed at putting flesh on the bones and bringing lost prehistories to life. The magazines cover title emphasizes a certain word: The Other Humans: Neanderthals Revealed. That word other is the center of a long-standing belief that appears to have collapsed. Were they really distinct from modern humans? What do we mean by other? Conjectures and cave stories about Neanderthals have been legion. The conventional wisdom for over a century (though less so recently) has been that Neanderthals were stocky, brutish and intellectually inferior beings who were supplanted by the leaner, smarter modern humans moving into their space. Neanderthals had brawn; moderns had brain. Who hasnt seen artwork of fur-clad grunter-hunters chasing after mammoths in the ice age? Though National Geographic entertained some of the latest controversies about Neanderthals, they chose a bad time to label them as other. A commentary in PNAS today has essentially removed the last argument for calling them different.1 The title is right to the point: Separating us from them: Neanderthal and modern human behavior. Pat Shipman (anthropologist, Penn State) began her commentary with a tone of remorse, as if ready to confess to a kind of paleontological racism: Neanderthals have always been treated like the poor relation in the human family. From the recognition of the first partial skeleton from Feldhofer, Germany, in 1856, Neanderthals made scientists uneasy. Initially they were viewed as too physically apelike to fit into Homo sapiens and too brutishly primitive to have been capable of modern human behavior. Now, new information on Neanderthal adaptations has come from Gibraltar, an island where an adult Neanderthal cranium and pieces of a Neanderthal childs skull were found previously. As reported in this issue of PNAS, evidence from Vanguard and Gorhams caves indicates that Neanderthals used unexpectedly modern and complex subsistence strategies.

Most anthropologists had already brought Neanderthals well within the human circle . Erik Trinkaus, for instance, believes that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred . Most accepted them as good hunters, dexterous, social, artistic and successful in just about every way no poor relation to modern humans. It has been known for a long time that their skull capacity is, on average, larger than ours. Still, many anthropologists just couldnt give up the notion that they were well, maybe not stupid, but not as sophisticated as moderns in terms of social behaviors, creativity, and living strategies. Shipman challenged that last argument for classifying Neanderthals as other. Evidence from the Gibraltar caves shows that they possessed all four complex behaviors thought characteristic of modern humans: broad use of land resources, sea fishing and hunting, (3) use of small scale resources, and (4) scheduling resource use by the seasons. This revelation came with some emotion. That modern human subsistence behaviors would show up among archaic humans like Neanderthals, even as late as ~28,000 B.P., she remarked, is startling. What does it mean? Basically, it means the anthropologists have been wrong about our brethren all along. It undermines the notion that Neanderthals were the losers in competition with more modern, more sophisticated Homo sapiens sapiens. Notice her last question: Paleoanthropologists currently debate whether any set of attributes of material culture can distinguish between modern and archaic human behavior. In particular, McBrearty and Brooks challenge the paradigm that there was an abrupt human revolution ~40,000 years ago in Europe that marked the invasion of modern humans and the onset of modern behavior (but see ref. 16 for another view). In Gibraltar, Neanderthals and modern humans apparently shared similar or identical modern subsistence practices at ~28,000, yet Neanderthals were clearly outside of the range of morphological and genetic variability of modern humans.2 If behavior did not separate us (modern humans) from them (Neanderthals), what did?

In addition, she asked, if Neanderthals and modern humans lived and worked side by side at Gibraltar with the same subsistence strategies, why did they go extinct? Shipman ended by saying, Answers to these questions are likely to be elusive. Her only hope was that more research into carefully chosen, meticulously excavated, and thoughtfully analyzed sites may be one way to begin to find them. I have to stop here video decription is to long

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Evolution
• neatderthal
• dna
• mt

[dogons2k12]

@GoodScienceForYou so what do you believe in exactly that modern man came from ISRAEL?!?!

So where did you get this PSEUDO SCIENCE from?!?! ZIONIST NEWS or FOX channel?!?

Which one is it?!?! LMAOF

[IFoundMyUsername]

We have two kind of people: the FIRST doesn't believe in "Out of Africa" for being racist and white-nationalist. They also think the brain size is important even if woman have more gray matter but got less Nobel Prizes.

The SECOND, doesn't believe in "Out of Africa" for being a religious man and swear we came from Adam. They also think the brain size is important even if atheists have larger brains than they have.

SAD

[millichocs]

The Neanderthal skull shown in this video is really long! And the nasal appertures are really large! I would love to see it fleshed out by an expert, to know what it looked like!

[trinitodbone4]

@dogons2k12 LOL

[raigekimaru]

@IFoundMyUsername

you sound just as judgmental as the second group you make assumptions about and antagonize. if you wish to challenge someone else's view point, ad hominem is not an intelligent way to do so. you're making a moral issue out of a scientific question. recent evidence for instance shows that both neanderthals and the newly discovered denisova hominid both contributed to the gene pool of modern humans, which goes against a strict interpretation of the Out of Africa theory.

[AlanCFA]

@GoodScienceForYou "Not one single geneticists could disprove it. " Name one who tried. You cannot. Your hypothesis is refuted by your OWN writings. You now write "You cannot breed with any species other than your own" which contradicts your earlier writing.

You now claim that Neanderthals were human and previously claimed that humans mated with chimps to produce them. You are so desperate to protect your religious beliefs that you make up crap constantly.