Global Warming: Junk Mathematics

Neanderthals and homo sapiens co-existed at the same time. There is absolutely no one in the scientific community suggesting we evolved from Neanderthal man.

If the audience is either too dense or too ideologically committed to some other way of thinking to buy off on the proof, then you haven't really proven anyting to them regardless of the quality of your logic.

Neanderthals and homo sapiens co-existed at the same time. There is absolutely no one in the scientific community suggesting we evolved from Neanderthal man.

...But there is a heated argument inside physical anthropology as to whether or not they cross bred. I'm betting they didn't but there is at least one fossil remains, from Spain, that some think suggests they might have.

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. Cort� 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....

McGentrix wrote:

Neanderthals and homo sapiens co-existed at the same time. There is absolutely no one in the scientific community suggesting we evolved from Neanderthal man.

Do you at least understand the point I've made here regarding humans, neanderthals, and more remote hominids such as homo heidelbergensis?

Einherjar utterly refuses or is unable to grasp it and there's really not anything more I can say on the topic. To me the logic in question is entirely the same thing as noting that if A > B and B > C, then A > C.

The one basic fallicy which underlies modern mathematics is the notion that there is such a thing as proving something. In reality, there is only such a thing as proving something to somebody's satisfaction. If the audience is either too dense or too ideologically committed to some other way of thinking to buy off on the proof, then you haven't really proven anyting to them regardless of the quality of your logic.

It can be determined on basis of phenotypes that Homo Heidelbergensis was less similar genetically to modern man than was neanderthal man. False

While DNA from a pre-Neandertal form, like the Homo heidelbergensis from Atapuerca, will probably never be recovered, it would be interesting to compare DNA from early Homo sapiens and Neandertals from Southwest Asia where the two coexisted for such a long period.

Einherjar wrote:

It can be determined on basis of phenotypes that Homo Heidelbergensis was less similar genetically to modern man than was neanderthal man. False

I claim this one is obviously true, despite the fact that nobody has tried to extract DNA material from heidelbergensis bones or teeth or radiocarbon date a heidelbergensis specimen, at least to my knowledge and internet sources appear to confirm this, e.g.

http://www.archaeology.org/9709/newsbriefs/dna.html

Quote:

While DNA from a pre-Neandertal form, like the Homo heidelbergensis from Atapuerca, will probably never be recovered, it would be interesting to compare DNA from early Homo sapiens and Neandertals from Southwest Asia where the two coexisted for such a long period.

and I would GUESS this is because scientists ASSUME that pre-neanderthal remains would be outside the range olf radiocarbon dating and would not provide DNA material.

I would also GUESS that they are wrong, and that they will shortly be seriously embarassed when some creationist study group actually does produce either a rc date or a DNA study from heidelbergensis remains.

I say again, it is totally obvious that you could not have heidelbergensis sitting there which is obviously much older than neanderthals and much more apelike and yet, at the same time, somehow magically have it be genetically more similar to modern humans. That's absurd.

Did anybody read this article?