The Non-Evolution of Modern Man

I merely wanted to show that even a ridiculous notion based on alien intervention is still, logically, much sounder than any notion based on God. Observe:

"How did we get from Neanderthal to modern man? I am modern man. I live on a planet. There are other planets. Other planets may have things living on them. Other things could have brought man to earth."...

They're simply not related to us other than possibly for involving similar design techniques. The neanderthal was a very advanced, extinct ape, the most advanced member of the same family which includes chimps and gorillas. We are simply not a member of that family. The genetic gap between us and Neanderthals is too big for us to be descended from them and the gap between us and any other hominid is bigger.

Recent genetic results show that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens interbred.

I 'm under the general impression that thay were always considered a collateral species of human.

Quote:

Recent genetic results show that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens interbred.

That's basically wishful thinking on the part of researchers who ought to know better. Every competently written article you'd ever find says that the Neanderthal made no measurable contribution to the genome of modern man.

That's basically wishful thinking on the part of researchers who ought to know better.

The contribution is quite measurable. It's about 4%.

...Part of the challenge of resolving the human"Neandertal interbreeding issue stems from the fact that so many fossil samples"of both early humans and more archaic humans"are contaminated with the DNA of the contemporary humans who have handled them. So even if a Neandertal sample contained a “real” (or endogenous) DNA sequence resembling early humans"which would indicate intimacy between the two groups"it might be considered contaminated. When Pääbo and colleagues looked for modern DNA, they found it in every sample they examined: in the Neandertal and early human fossils"and even in cave bear teeth. To circumvent this problem, they looked only for Neandertal mtDNA as evidence of interbreeding. Since it is easy to distinguish modern human mtDNA sequences from the four Neandertal mtDNA samples that have been sequenced so far, the researchers decided to determine whether Neandertal-like mtDNA could be found in other Neandertal fossils as well as in early human remains.

As these fossils are precious commodities, Pbo's group applied a technique developed in their lab that uses amino acid content as a measure of extractable endogenous DNA and requires removing just 10 mg of bone from a specimen rather than much larger pieces of bone. Of 24 Neandertal and 40 early modern human fossils analyzed, they found four Neandertal and five early human specimens that passed the amino acid test. These fossils included samples classified as “transitional” between the two groups and represented a wide distribution across Europe, where the two groups would likely have encountered one another. When they analyzed these samples for Neandertal mtDNA, they found mtDNA sequences that are absent in contemporary human mtDNA genes but quite similar to those found in the four previously sequenced Neandertals. They found no Neandertal-like mtDNA in the early human samples.

While the authors explain that it's impossible to definitively conclude that no genetic flow occurred between early humans and Neandertals given the limited number of early human fossils available, they point out that even fossil samples considered as anatomically transitional between modern humans and Neandertals failed to show evidence of mtDNA exchange. Thus, Pääbo and colleagues conclude, while it's possible that Neandertals made a small contribution to the genetic makeup of contemporary humans, the evidence cannot support the possibility of a large contribution.

The article you provided is from 2004. Things have changed since then. The new genetic evidence is well documented and compelling.

...Whatever the tools suggest, the skeletons of moderns and Neanderthals look different, and the pattern of their differences is too consistent to dismiss. As anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico has shown, those skeletal differences clearly reflect two distinct patterns of behavior, however alike the archeological leavings may be. Furthermore, the two physical types do not follow one from the other, nor do they meet in a fleeting moment before one triumphs and the other fades. They just keep on going, side by side but never mingling. In his behavioral approach to bones, Trinkaus purposely disregards the features that might best discriminate Neanderthals and moderns from each other genetically. By definition, these traits are poor indicators of the effects of life-style on bone, since their shape and size are decided by heredity, not by use. But there is one profoundly important aspect of human life where behavior and heredity converge: the act that allows human lineages to continue in the first place.

Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.

Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.

But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.

Of course, to interbreed, you first have to meet. Some researchers have contended that the coexistence on the slopes of Mount Carmel for tens of thousands of years is merely an illusion created by the poor archeological record. If moderns and Neanderthals were physically isolated from each other, then there is nothing mysterious about their failure to interbreed. The most obvious form of isolation is geographic. But imagine an isolation in time as well. The climate of the Levant fluctuated throughout the Middle Paleolithic--now warm and dry, now cold and wet. Perhaps modern humans migrated up into the region from Africa during the warm periods, when the climate was better suited to their lighter, taller, warm-adapted physiques. Neanderthals, on the other hand, might have arrived in the Levant only when advancing glaciers cooled their European range more than even their cold-adapted physiques could stand. Then the two did not so much cohabit as time-share the same pocket of landscape between their separate continental ranges.

While the solution is intriguing, there are problems with it. Hominids are remarkably adaptable creatures. Even the ancient Homo erectus- -who lacked the large brain, hafted spear points, and other cultural accoutrements of its descendants--managed to thrive in a range of regions and under diverse climatic conditions. And while hominids adapt quickly, glaciers move very, very slowly, coming and going. Even if one or the other kind of human gained sole possession of the Levant during climatic extremes, what about all those millennia that were neither the hottest nor the coldest? There must have been long stretches of time--perhaps enduring as long as the whole of recorded human history--when the Levant climate was perfectly suited to both Neanderthals and modern humans. What part do these in-between periods play in the time-sharing scenario? It doesn’t make sense that one human population should politely vacate Mount Carmel just before the other moved in.

If these humans were isolated in neither space nor time but were truly contemporaneous, then how on earth did they fail to mate? Only one solution to the mystery is left. Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed in the Levant because they could not. They were reproductively incompatible, separate species--equally human, perhaps, but biologically distinct. Two separate species, who both just happened to be human at the same time, in the same place. ...

This is the major thing anybody interested in this question needs to read: