Frightening new take on Neanderthals

The guy has made several good catches, particularly the thing about the big Neanderthal eye sockets and the question of nocturnalism. Nonetheless the big picture he tries to paint is basically an evoloser fairytale.

Worst case: 100,000 Neanderthals have hunted us down to fifty guys and they own the night, and then we wipe them off the Earth... i mean, think really hard and see if you can't figure out what's wrong with that.......

Another note, I'd really hate to have a nose as sensitive as those Neanderthal nasal openings indicate and smell as bad as they would if this guy is right about the long ice-age fur....

http://www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm

If I understand the author(s?) there is a suspicion that autistic traits, on the autistic spectrum, could reflect traits that Neanderthal had.

Well, if there was interbreeding, I would guess that the impetus was based on a Neanderthal female wanting to "marry up" with a male Homosapien. I say this tongue in cheek; However, a Neanderthal woman might have wanted to have more diverse conversations with Homosapien women that were supposedly more talkative than Neanderthal women?

Autism is one of the great mysteries of our age. I mean, it existed 60 years ago but it was hellishly rare and I don't see how it could have exploded the way it has if it were a genetic problem, the classical Haldane dilemma would prevent that.

I assume also that genes shared between us and Neanderthals are either a pure coincidence or artifacts of a designer re-using a few parts here and there since there is absolutely zero physical evidence of human/Neanderthal crossbreeding on the planet.

Also given what we now know about Neanderthal DNA, I would assume that Vendramini is right about what they looked like...

forensic artists, working with genetcists and anatomists have produced versions of facial and body reconstructions that were waay more human looking than this guy. He's just trying to make a good story out of that reconstruction.

lso, most of the Neanderthal sites are in Europe. There are like 4 sites in the areas that wed call the Levant. The dates of these sites isnt remarkeably different than others and in two cases the dates are quite a bit younger.

I have an open mind but yesterday I did a bit more reading about this and Im getting more skeptical of his ideas. Like I said, it makes a great story and that is what I think hes most interested in rather than science.
After all, hes unafilliated with anything and so , all his stuff needs to be spread by more journalistic means and by so doing, he may have sacrificed accuracy for the " story maguffin"

More typical Gunga Dim bullshit. Given all we know about the genome of canis lupus familiaris, you can't look at a genetic sample and know if you're gonnna get a Mexican Hairless or a St. Bernard. Gunga is emminently prepared to argue his case with grammar school children.

Rare you and I would agree on something like this but that's my take as well. The macro story the guy is telling is bullshit but, as bullshit goes, particularly good bullshit and the kind which Hollywood and TV producers love.

The point is, you CAN look at the nature of an ice age and see that every other animal in it has super dense and long fur coats, and then figure out what is wrong about wanting the apex predator of that world to be running around naked and freezing to death...

I recognize a certain logic to that argument. However, we also know that Neanderthals wore clothing. So it's not a foregone conclusion that they needed long hair to survive that climate.

Hominims evolved in Africa, probably on the savannah near the forest's edge. Hairlessness and heat loss thru sweating is advnatageous there, for a bipedal animal that can forage and hunt over long distances. That occupied four million years. It is far more probable that our ancestors lost most of our fur before we ever left that continent. Hairiness is unlikely to reevolve.

Neanderthals had tool assemblages that would have enabled them to make clothes, probably not tailored clothes, but clothes nonetheless. At glacial temperatures any hominim would not have survived without them. Tooth wear patterns are consistent with using teeth to soften skins. You chew them and that softens them. With clothes you don't need fur--look at Eskimos and Lapps, whose ancestors have been there for at least five or six thousand years, and are probably less hairy than you are.

There were distinct Neanderthal populations, and different adaptations depending on where they lived. The Levant, which Vendramini is talking about, was not covered by ice. It was south of the glaciers. It was always non-glacial.Therefore speculation about beinbg covered by fur doesn't even apply. Further, again tooth-wear analysis and isotopic analysis of the composition of teeth, which show traces of people's diets, show that the diet of Neanderthals in the Levant was quite varied, including both meat and significant plant components, in contrast to the diet of more northerly Neanders who lived closer to the glaciers, whose diet consisted in large part of meat This is in direct contradiction to Vendramini's hypothesis that Levant Neanders became totally apex predators on homo sap sap. The Levant Neanders were also much more gracile (lighter bones and different length/diameter ratios), closer to us, than the heavier boned Northern Neanders, which would have made them a good deal less like prehistoric Arnold Schwarzeneggers.

Further, tho h sap sap and neanders shared a common toolkit early on, by the time he's talking about h.s.s. had developed a considerably better stone/bone technology, with more effective, specialized tools. The bigger guns usually win, and we had 'em, figuratively speaking. They didn't.

Put it all together, the whole Neander predation hypothesis is highly unlikely. Which is why the whole thing seems to have pretty much sunk without a trace from a search of the literature. I think someone mentioned Erich VonDanikin (sp?) and "Chariots of the Gods". This looks like another similar case.

Incidentally, gungas contention that Neanders are halfway between chimps and us is wrong. They've sequenced a significant part of the Neander genome, and looking at the differences, and kind of radically simplifying it, it looks like they're about 6/7 like us rather than chimps (that's six sevenths, it looks a little weird in numerals), which is pretty consistent with thegeneral consensus that on the path from a chimp/hominim split around four milllion years ago, the neander/h. sap. split was about 500,000 years ago.

Oh, and there was indeed a genetic crunch when the apparent breeding population was very small, but that was in Africa around 150,000 years ago, around the beginning of modern h. sap. No evidence for a later, more severe one between 100,000 to 50,000 years ago in the Levant, which Vendramini is hypothesizing.

Does not look good for his case.

All that I've mentioned in support of Vendramini is that he's made several very good catches, including the apelike appearance, the big eyes and nocturnalism, and the fur.

They weren't apelike. Look at ape physiology and h sap physiology. They're like us. Nocturnalism is unlikely. They weren't even remotely lemur-like. Hairiness is also unlikely.

good stuff MJ , the common ancestor then gave s a H heidelbergensis (which is the structural predesessor to neanderthals ) and H accessor (which was the earlier H sa form that became H ss and H si [idaltu]).
The part of the Neanderthal genome that was the most "WOOPPEEE time for Svante Paabo (the guy that did most of the sequencing along with a geneticist form Penn State whose name Ive forgotten). Paabo was able to re contruct the number 2 chromosome of both Neanderthals and US . This was the chromosome that was the fusion of two chromosomes of a chimp. SO the toes to neanderthals as opposed to chimps is one of a successive step that show both neanders and us broke from the common ancestor and share a lot of our genomes .
Paabo is only like 98% done so who knows whether the other 17 or 19 major zonal differences in the genomes of chimps . neanders and us will be found

The problem with your thesis is that early modern man lived on the periglacial steppes, too, and didn't freeze to death. So the point is that you, as always, selectively apply your conditions to your thesis without taking into account the very obvious flaws in your thesis based on those conditions.

Or are you now saying that our early modern man ancestors were also covered with "super dense long fur coats?" Are you aware that h. neanderthalis discovered how to use flint and iron pyrite to make fires? If they were running around in "super dense long fur coats," why did they need to build fires?

Say what?

what?

nenanderthals had those really neat pimp coats too.
Mausterian culture , which was all the early bookkeeping on neanderthals, showed that they werent really as brutish as gungas guy wants to go. Remember, gunga thinks this is bullshit too, so were really not at far ends of a ruler here

You know, sometimes things are so obvious to me that i forget to mention them. Gunga Dim, the most persistent denier of evolution at this site, complete with his schoolyard insults like "evoluserism," is specifying an evolutionary mechanism--natural selection--to clothe h. neanderthalis in a "super dense long fur." But perhaps i err; perhaps his imaginary friend, God, just pointed his noodly appendage and POOF ! ! !, in an act of special creation, clothed all the h. neanderthalis in a "super dense long fur." Gunga wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

If you are confused about Paabo. maybe thisll be clerare (Course its the way I read it not that its still the way it IS). Paabo, at Planck Institute was doing the reconstruction of the NEanderthal genome. Until the early 2000's he only managed to do about 10 % . LAter he dound more pulpy fossil teeth and extracted viable DNA and osteocalcin from wich he did the sequencing till now hes almost cpomplete. HE DID find that the chromosme 2a and 2b of a chimp (A chimp has 23 pair of chromosomes while we have 22), had been fused after we split from chimps . We know this because the structure of our number 2 chromosome is the exact stacking of the chimps 2 and 3 . We can see the extra telomeres and centromeres where they should be is these two were stacked together. SO it turned out that Nenaderthal and us share this fused chromosome but we dont know about heidelbergensis, the neanders immediate ancestor. We dont have any DNA from heidelbergensis, that was maybe 1.5 million years old