Frightening new take on Neanderthals

So Bigfoot is just a neanderthal left over?

Er... I thought that a flat nose was adapted for a warm climate, while long noses were adapted for a cold climate. (The longer nose allowing for warming and moistening inhalations.

Most likely, the humans raped and ate them, not the other way around.

Nobody would have to lose any sleep worrying about ME raping anything which looked like that....

well, its thought provoking at least. Whats the picture of the thing on the left side with the big cheek bones? Is this supposed to be our H. s. i. or H. s. s. forebears ? If so, its a bit imaginative.

Ill wit till I can get the book from Amazon at 12.50. I aint spoendin no 29.95 for another Eric von Deniken type story.
How did he get Svante Paabo to give such a positive review? I wonder if he got some penyenzees?

I have been waiting for somebody like you to weigh in, farmerman. I am sometimes led astray by such stories.

I dont know enough about this but Svante Paabo is THE guy on Neanderthal genomes. Hes for real. I only know that this author is a"hobbyist" and a successful writer of popular stuff about science. Thats doesnt mean he's full of ****. Many really big finds were made by amateurs so Ill wait till someone does somemore homework. Neanderthals were of a wider range than he proposes and so were Hss and Hsi. Homo sapiens idaltu didnt seem to have any interaction with Neanderthals and they lived around the Afar and East Africa up to Ethipea.
Still, having someone like Paabo show "interest" is amazing unless its an early April Fools.

HMM, the entire site may be be a hoax, Someone pulled Svante Paabo's comment and just left it gone. SO, when a book , 3 years old and rather controversial, isnt even reviewed by Nature or SCience or Anthropology, I begin to wonder whether the APril Fool thing wsnt true.

The fact that gunga buys ot shoulda tipped me off. AT least I was open minded for a while

This is an archetypal case of evolutionism poisoning science. The man has done some good analysis and you'd be losing valuable information to dismiss his case entirely; particularly the idea of the large Neanderthal eye sockets indicating large, predator eyes and nocturnal-ism after Neanderthals became total carnivores in the ice-age environment. Likewise his reconstructions of Neanderthal appearances make more sense than what we normally see given that Neanderthal DNA is typically described as about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee. The claim of ice-age style long fur is also believable.

The theory involves the claim that Neanderthal genome data released in 2010 indicates that "Neanderthals had interbred with early humans from the Middle East ". Other studies which I'd put more faith in indicate that this never happened. Particularly James Shreeve's "Neanderthal Peace":

http://discovermagazine.com/1995/sep/theneanderthalpe558

indicated that there was zero physical evidence of crossbreeding and studies on plos-biology's website indicate that the Neanderthal was ruled out as a plausible human ancestor because the genetic gap is simply too wide.

There is a problem with the idea of nocturnal predation 50K years ago for a number of reasons and the familliar gambler's problem which kills PE would also kill the idea of a dominant Neanderthal species reducing the planet's human population to 50 individeuals in one area and then that human species spreading out all over the planet and wiping the Neanderthals out all over the planet. In real life when a species gets reduced to a tiny group in a small area, it goes extinct.

Other than for the good catches on the large eye sockets and the likelihood of long ice-age style fur, Vendramini's theory may be BS but, as BS goes, it is particularly good BS and the sort of story which the popular media loves. I'd expect to hear more about it in the future.

This involves all sorts of classic question begging. For example, that Neanderthals became "total carnivores in the ice age environment." Israeli archaeologists have been, for many years, studying a site at which both Neanderthals and early modern humans lived side by side for many generations. In fact, the evidence is that the Neanderthal arrived after the early modern humans. The middens of the Neanderthal do show that they relied more heavily on hunting than on gathering, but not that they relied exclusively on hunting. Palestine tens of thousands of years ago ceratinly had a climate affected by massive glaciation, but it wasn't an "ice age environment."

I see that Gunga Dim is dusting off that old "half way between our DNA and chimpanzee DNA" horseshit, too. Given that the difference between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome is 5% or less, half way between is no great difference at all.

But it is refreshing honesty to see Gunga admitting that he's posted BS here--he's usually not that candid.

I took a course in hunting /gathering but I failed the part on gathering. Turns out it wasnt about sewing

OK, i'll bite . . . what was it about, social media?

I saw a programme which suggested Neanderthals did not die out, they were just assimilated. Their DNA is still in us.

My dads side of the family was from Georgia ( the country not the state), and I always thought they looked like Lon Chaney Jr. (and that was the women)

Then there are the career NCOs of the United States Marine Corps . . .

Interesting conjecture. I wonder if all the pieces fit. Have any of the usual scientific peer review validation points been passed?

Blumenbach opined that these people were among the most beautiful in the world, and named an entire race after them, Caucasians, in his racial classification system.

Some of this guy's points seem compelling (from the video). But a lot of his other ideas seem to be no more than sensationalism and conjecture. This idea of "racial genetic memory" to account for why we find big dark hairy angry looking monsters with red eyes to be scary is completely unsubstantiated and more than a little bit silly.

On the whole I would say he's got an interesting concept and a flashy enough bit of imagery and sensationalized story (complete with raping and pillaging and cannibalism) to sell more than a few books. But he's unlikely to shake up the scientific world without a lot more empirical evidence to back up his claim. This story seems like it's on track to go down the same track as the aquatic ape hypothesis (i.e., a dead-end).

What would really be interesting is some cave paintings of the hominids of the time. And come to think of it, why didn't any of the ancient cave painters do self portraits or drawings of others in their clan. Did we just not find the right caves yet, or was there a taboo against it? It seems odd to me that things like that are missing. (I'm not talking about stick figures). Maybe the painting materials back then weren't versatile enough to attempt accurate renderings of appearance.