Frightening new take on Neanderthals

He does this all the time. I reminded him of it just yesterday in another thread in which he DID believe his ****

sauce be upon him

I'd thought about that but I doubt it. If Bigfoot was real and was one of these, there would be no shortage of evidence in the form of missing cattle and other farm animals, and in bodies of butchered farm and forest animals lying around all over the place.

Amongst Vendramini's good catches is the fact that Neanderthal skulls are very good matches for apes' faces, and very bad matches for ours:



This in fact is what you'd expect given that Neanderthal DNA is generally described as about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee and I am waiting for apologies from several A2Kers who have falsely called bullshit when I've stated this (with documentation) in the past.

It's funny how it looks nothing like the skull that is actually IN a chimp. I guess he forgot about the science of calculating from the skull and decided to just do a drawing to try to marry ape and neanderthal.

This is what a real "ape" skull looks like. Note the heavy eye brow bones that aren't present in the neanderthal skull.

The Neanderthal skull, as the DNA evidence would predict, is about halfway between that and one of ours. It's still a much better fit for ape features than for ours.

Yeah, and that idiot graphic doesn't account for the underslung jaw, which h. neanderthalis also doesn't have. Why does Gunga Dim hate Neanderthals?

bullshit. That "forced fittting" to make an apes face is totally lacking in any kind of forensic skill. Hes just trying to blow smoke up our ass on that. AS far as the DNA evidence, that too is bullshit. human and chimp genomes are strikingly similar, they differ in the way that each organism has adapted to its ownspecific environment and in areas called HARs (Human Accelerated Regions ) of the genome, and there are 202 of these HARs. The Neanderthal genome (from what Ive seen from Paabos reports in Nature and SCience) may be "halfaway between humans and chimps. BUT the interesting thing is that the Neanderthlla genome is halfaway CLOSER to humans than chimps. The Neanderthals contain most of the same HARs (These are specidic to neural pathways) as humans . AND, the splicing together of the chimps 1 and 2 chromosome is seen in both the Neanderthal and huiman genomes (Faribanks 2007). In other words Neanderthals are halfway CLOSER to us than they are to chimps. Theyve got most of the genomic "advances" present in a humans genome that chimpanzees do not.
I understand as one who denies evolution, just being "Halfway between" human and chimp that you have carefully also omitted the concept of what that ha;fway point represents. Youre a creationist so yo cant accept that the "Vector" of a moving genome is as important as what genes are in play.

SO, your buddy's argument and "wish list" is not backed up by any evidence. In fact evidence refutes those points

No, it's not a better fit at all.

The spinal column would have to come out of the back of the head to even get the skull to fit in the ape as drawn.

Then the nose is in the wrong place on the skull vs the ape.

This is what a neanderthal skull and eyes would look like in a human, again courtesy of Vendramini:

I thought the neanderthal had RED eyes according to Vendramini.

I wonder whether the neanderthals supraorbital ridge gave the illusion of a biggr orbital socket.

Being adapted to nocturnal hunting may have more likely been some adaptation to lower light levels in northern climates.

Also, Vendramini talks about cat-like pupils and iris. Thats a deep pos to evidence.


Im n ot that interested but do any primates have vertical slit eyeballs?

Neanderthal pointing out the obvious physical (and therefore, intellectual) limitations of Gunga Dim . . .

Three's no present primate which is a pure carnivore or even more than an occasional carnivore. The big eyes were to see at night, the verticle slit pupils would have been to protect the eyes from sunlight in daytime (assuming they were there at all). The vertical pupils are problematical and basically an assumption or best guess on Vendramini's part.

chimps are omnivorous and do sustain themselves for long periods with a meatatarian existence, I think that baboons are omnivorous also as are the lemurs. Tarsiers are also bug eaters and have horizontal slit eyes and these are the only extant species Ive found.

Setanta's neanderthal looks more anatomically correct, (with the exception of the Brooks Brothers zoot)

Whoever did Vendramini's re-creations doesn't know jack.

All hominim's from way before Lucy have the spinal column entering the base of the skull, rather than the great apes' back of the base, which Vendramini's guy uses, which erroneously contributes to a supposed Neanderthal apishness. Gotta be the base, because it's a specific adaptation to bipedalism--you've got this juge weight at the end of a lever/pendulum and you've got to balance it, so it sits ON TOP, Neanderthal included. They weren't knuckle walkers, after all.
]

Neanderthals had somewhat bigger brains than we do, 1400-1450cc versus our average 1350cc (not in question at all, you measure the interior of the skull). That's somewhat more than three times the average of the great apes. That IS NOT apelike. Their skulls had a bit lower crown, but a larger bulge in back than we do, but was NOT apelike.

He's got the angle of orientation of the skull wrong, which skews the re-creation of the face.

His "expert" didn't know jack, and Vendramini doesn't either.

And, jes, neanderthat was much farther from chimps than Gunga, peculiarly, thinks. They share 99.7% of our genes, chimps may be as high as 98.8%, tho some recent studies of similarity put it as low as 94%. That's .03 versus 1.2, i.e. 3/4 of the way to us. Mitochondrial DNA analyses show Neanders with about 1/7 of the differences from us that chimps have.

Venramini is WAY off.

Not if he's just trying to sell books $$$ cha ching $$$

Here's Svante Paabo, for ya, Farmer, delivering one of the TED talks. He thinks Neanderthals and us are pretty much the same, incidentally.
http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inner_neanderthal.html

And here's a new take on whether Neanderthal's were really nasty, brutish, and short. And Vendramini still ain't lookin' good when you look at the evidence.

Vendramini explains it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZbmywzGAVs

Again I see Vendramini as having made several spectacularly good catches including the question of what Neanderthals looked like. I do not buy his overall theory of the prehistory of humans and Neanderthals.