Do you know who else was descended from Neanderthals?Gandhi?
...Neanderthals, who possessed the gene for languageThis is sloppy reporting - FOXP2 is not "the language gene".
Given the number of classical neanderthal features I observed in the white male population around me I always figured there was cross breeding.According to the article, you ought to have been looking for features shared by everyone native to the Americas, Australia, etc. too.
I thought one of the definitions of species included "a distinct group whose members could could only breed with each other"That's mostly right, but the trouble with any bright-line definition of species is that it's doomed to fail in some applications, because ability to interbreed is not transitive. Only a few applications fail spectacularly when you try to apply them to modern ring species. But if you start looking at gradual differences in space-time rather than just in space, then every sexually reproducing animal belongs to the same "ring species": capable of interbreeding with its parents' generation, which were capable of interbreeding with their parents' generation, all the way back to a common ancestor and then forward again to any "different species" on Earth today.
Wouldn't this research tend to prove racists correct in their claim that there is an intrinsic difference between sub-Saharan Africans and... everyone else?(1) Yes.
The Neanderthals may have been gradually absorbed into the population of anatomically modern humans via interbreeding and replacement. As Mangerud explained, "Probably modern humans ousted the Neanderthals."Granted, Native Americans are not a separate species from Homo sapiens, but I think the larger point - that there is a human tendency towards a societal consensus that the Other is not human, or human enough, and should be shunned and exterminated - has been largely proven by history.
Slimak likens this to what happened to earlier populations from the Americas.
"In a bit more than 500 years, what will remain of the traditional native societies in America? Just imagine what will remain of these impressive cultures, or their territories, during the next millennium," he said.
Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Meanwhile, early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.posted by Termite at 2:02 PM on July 19, 2011 [2 favorites]
Hm. The neanderthal culture - if that's the proper word - existed far longer than homo sapiens culture. If they had language, what stories, ideas, societies did they develop?I don't think it really follows, from what you quote, that "neanderthal culture existed far longer than homo sapiens culture":Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Meanwhile, early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Some people classify Neaderthals as homo sapiens neanderthalensis and modern humans as homo sapiens sapiens, which designates them as the same species.And of course it's beyond that, since our last common ancestors with Neanderthals (prior to the subsequent interbreeding) were from hundreds of thousands of years before either of us existed. So people subscribing to this view also refer to a bunch of different categories of ancient homo this way - for example "homo sapiens heidelbergensis" rather than "homo heidelbergensis".
Well if our ancestors bred with Neanderthals, doesn't that mean that they were not a different species after all? I thought one of the definitions of species included "a distinct group whose members could could only breed with each other".Neanderthals are actually classified as a subtype of homo sapiens. And also
Interesting to me also is that if 9% of the X chromosome comes from Neanderthals, then it would seem to me that modern human men would be more likely to express these genes? Because modern women, with 2 X chromosomes, would have more chances to have the sub-Saharan version on one, if not the other, of their X chromosomes.It depends on which gene is dominant.
Racist? God-that-I-don't-believe-in I'm tired of this crap. I've addressed these issues before. I believe in equality before the law. But, I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy.Maybe he's become "respectable" since then, but if you look around he doesn't really try to deny it. It's not so much that he's out there saying hugely racist things, rather he slants his coverage of science in that direction, and seems to be closely related to guys like Steve Sailor and Charles Murray. He also said he agreed with James Watson's racist outburst a few years ago.
The neanderthal culture - if that's the proper word - existed far longer than homo sapiens culture. If they had language, what stories, ideas, societies did they develop?What's "culture" here? Neanderthals and modern humans existed and used tools for long overlapping time spans. Humans and Neanderthals both had 'culture' at the same time. Modern humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and Neanderthals only died out 30k years ago.
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posted by wcfields at 10:12 AM on July 19, 2011 [2 favorites]