The April 2000 issue of Scientific American has an interesting article on
Neanderthals. It discusses evidence that Neanderthals bred with modern men
and behaved in modern ways. Kate Wong writes a remarkably balanced and
accurate account of the debate in anthropology over the last few years
concerning the Neanderthal genetics, their behavior and the evidence for
them interbreeding with modern humans. Of the latter, this article is the
first place I have seen a picture of the Neanderthal/human hybrid child (p.
103) which was discovered in Portugal last year of which I wrote about in
the Sept 1999 PSCF (See News and Views, p. 145) A quick glance shows that
the tibia is much much shorter than that found in modern humans. This is a
Neandertal trait.
Some of the items from the article:
"He [Randall White] adds that if you look at the Near East around 90,000
years ago, anatomically modern humans and Neandertals were both making
Mousterian stone tools, which, though arguably less elaborate than
Aurignacian tools, actually require a considerable amount of know-how. 'I
cannot imagine that Neandertals were producing these kinds of
technologically complex tools and passing that on from generation to
generation without talking about it,' White declares 'I've seen a lot of
people do this stuff, and I can't stand over somebody's shoulder and learn
how to do it without a lot of verbal hints.' Thus, White and others do not
buy the argument that moderns were somehow cognitively superior, especially
if Neandertals' inferiority meant that they lacked language. Instead it
seems that moderns invented a culture that relied more heavily on material
symbols.
"Researchers have also looked to Neandertal brain morphology for clues to
their cognitive ability. According to Ralph L. Holloway of Colombian
University, all the brain asymmetries that characterize modern humans are
found in Neandertals. 'To be able to discriminate between the two,' he
remarks, 'is, at the moment, impossible.'" Kate Wong, "Who Were the
Neanderthals," Scientific American April 2000, p. 106
Why did the Neanderthals go extinct? They didn't!
"On the other hand, if Neandertals were an equally capable variant of our
own species, as Smith and Wolpoff believe, long-term overlap of Neandertals
and the new population moving into Europe would have left plenty of time for
mingling, hence the mixed morphology that these scholars see in late
Neandertals and early moderns in Europe. And if these groups were exchanging
genes, they were probably exchanging cultural ideas, which might account for
some of the similarity between, say, the Chatelperronian and the
Aurignacian. Neandertals as entities disappeared, Wolpoff says, because they
were outnumbered by the newcomers. Thousands of years of interbreeding
between the small Neandertal population and the larger modern human
population, he surmises, diluted the distinctive Neandertal features, which
ultimately faded away.
"'If we look at Australians a thousand years from now, we will see that the
European features have predominated [over those of native Australians] by
virtue of many more Europeans,' Wolpoff asserts. 'Not by virtue of better
adaptation, not by virtue of different culture, not by virtue of anything
except many more Europeans. And I really think that's what describes what we
see in Europe--we see the predominance of more people.'" Kate Wong, "Who
Were the Neanderthals," Scientific American April 2000, p. 107
The article also supports one of the ideas I have mentioned on our
list--that blond hair and blue eyes might be a Neanderthal trait. The
article has a drawing of a Neanderthal woman looking in a mirror. Her hair
is blond; her eyes are blue. What is the evidence that these are Neanderthal
traits? Well, blond hair gives a person some protection against frostbite.
Rensberger writes:
"Recently, there has been some evidence that skin colors are linked to
differences in the ability to avoid injury from the cold. Army researchers
found that during the Korean War blacks were more susceptible to frostbite
than were whites. Even among Norwegian soldiers in World War II, brunettes
had a slightly higher incidence of frostbite than did blondes." ~ Boyce
Rensberger, "Racial Odyssey," in Elvio Angeloni, Editor, Annual Editions
Physical Anthropology 94/95,(Sluicedock,Guilford, Conn.: The Dushkin
Publishing Group, Inc., 1994), p.40-45, p. 42
Neanderthals lived in the coldest environments on earth. And blue eyes
enable a person to see in dimmer /redder light, such as would have been the
case in Glacial Europe.
Secondly, the only place that blond hair and blue eyes are found is within
the former range of the Neanderthal! Eskimos handle the cold via other
means--having extra blood vessels in their feet.
Thus, the Neanderthals are most likely us-- or those of European ancestry
carry some of their genes with us.
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