Neanderthal admixture in humans!

[Traianvs]

oh and lol at the pictures. Which amateur created those?

[Barnabas]

Can we guess that, then, probably neanderthals probably had a language and were not that different from mothern humans?

Otherwise, the interbreeding would only have been throu rape of Homo Sapien Sapiens females by Neanderthals, or nailing of Neanderthal ladies by pervy Homo Sapiens who were turned on by coarse hairy stocky women with no language whatsoever

[ricketyclik]

They are all humans. Neanderthals are not a separate species as they can and did interbreed with other humans.

I can't get past this. I've always understood it to be if they can breed, then they're the same species.

[ramseya]

Well horses and donkeys aren't the same species but can produce fertile offspring (there have been many cases of fertile female mules).

There are also cross-genera hybrids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebird_hybrids) although it doesn't seem those are fertile.

[Berzerker]

I'm too lazy, from cfc

by the look of some ancient humans down under, I'd say there was some mixing between us and the erectus population - including the "hobbits" of Flores. During the ice age much of Indonesia was a continent so migrating populations would have not only met up with erectus but eventually carried their genes into Australia. The people of Flores have legends of the little people (hobbits) placing them close by in time, not ~30 kya as the Neandertals were disappearing. My question is: why weren't the erectus peoples of SE Asia evolving in our direction? Or in any direction (other than shrinking like the hobbits)? Seriously, we're told erectus evolved into us - but this didn't happen outside of a small region of E Africa. The erectus populations that left Africa more than a million years ago didn't evolve into us or even in our direction, they stayed in relative stasis or got even bulkier like Neandertals living in ice age Europe. I imagine some of these "Neandertal" genes are actually erectus genes.

And aborigines not only appear more "primitive", they have myths of the "dreamtime" when they were among the first peoples to be created by the gods and their journey. Kow Swamp is a famous fossil of a 10 kyo aborigine with erectus like features. I dont think Neandertals had brains 20% larger, the average we have for them was slightly more than modern humans but we have much greater variation and range. Today's eskimo supposedly have slightly larger brains so the thinking is living in ice age like conditions produces larger brains for whatever reason.

[ricketyclik]

Well horses and donkeys aren't the same species but can produce fertile offspring (there have been many cases of fertile female mules).

There are also cross-genera hybrids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebird_hybrids) although it doesn't seem those are fertile.

All of those in the link are fowl-fowl, pheasant-pheasant and duck-duck. And Equidae (sometimes known as the horse family) is the taxonomic family of horses and related animals, including the extant horses, donkeys, and zebras, and many other species known only from fossils. All extant species are in the genus Equus.

I think I might be mis-using the term species. Is what Heraclitus said right? They're human, but a different species of human?

[ramseya]

No Horses and Donkeys are the same genus (Equus) but different species. Those fowl hybrids where different genera.

It can be weird sometimes. For example, dogs have immense variety between breeds but are all canis lupus. Wolves are usually seen by layfolk as being very different from dogs (wolf-dog mixtures are called 'hybrids') but in fact, wolves are canis lupus, as well, the same species as dogs (remember, they've only been diverged from about 10,000 years; Neanderthals and us have been diverged for at least 100,000 years)

For Neanderthals, there's debate. Some consider them their own species, others consider them the same species as us but a different subspecies. One could make the argument that racial groups are subspecies but subspecies, from my understanding, is not a very clear scientific characterization. Regardless, neanderthals show more divergence from modern humans than within modern humans (as demonstrated by Heraclitus posts of skulls between the races [although the Aboriginal is bizarrely different])

[Heraclitus]

Can we guess that, then, probably neanderthals probably had a language and were not that different from mothern humans?

Otherwise, the interbreeding would only have been throu rape of Homo Sapien Sapiens females by Neanderthals, or nailing of Neanderthal ladies by pervy Homo Sapiens who were turned on by coarse hairy stocky women with no language whatsoever

Neanderthals used fire and tools. They buried their dead. Its most likely they had language. They had a FOXP2 gene identical to that of modern humans (its associated with language).


Its perhaps easy to dismiss their material culture as less impressive than that of Sapiens at the time, but one should keep in mind that most experts now agree that the complexity of the material culture is primarily a function of population density and size. So this could easily be an explanation for their "lack of creativity" or whatever, since they quickly adopted tool making skills from Sapiens once exposed to it.

[ramseya]

Heraclitus:

I could be wrong but I seem to remember reading that Neanderthals might have had the mental capacity for language but did not have the physiological requirements in the throat (hyoid bone, descended larynx) to allow them to speak.

[Al B. Sure!]

Hey Heraclitus, I googled some more and found something interesting about that aboriginal skull. All the images are from a specimen known as Pintubi-1 from the Pintubi tribe. The specimen is believed to have lived in the late 19th century but does have characteristics of an archaic homo sapiens.

http://canovanograms.tripod.com/pintubi1/

there's more images on the site.







Now, presumably other aborigines aren't the same although I can't say this for a fact because all the skulls I saw online were replicas of this specimen.

But how does this happen? Australia was settled 40,000 years ago, well after archaic homo sapiens had died out or evolved.

And it sounds socially scary but is it possible that there are morphologically archaic homo sapiens walking around today in Australia? It would seem there would be more scientific interest in this possibility but as a layperson, am I missing something?

[trev]

The Pintubi tribe lived out in the Great Sandy Desert, possibly the harshest conditions in the world for people to survive in, extremely hot and dry, very irregular rainfull and were among the last aborigines to be contacted by European settlers. They were nomads travelling large distances in their hunter/gatherer lifestyle and never built anything other than temporary shelters.
With these very harsh conditions, a balanced diet would not have been possible, so this may have led to anatomical differences from other humans. Of course this suggests that other ancient humans also may have been anatomically different also because of dietary constraints if that is the case here.

[ricketyclik]

And then there are our Rugby League players...