On Thu, 10 Jul 1997 23:06:48 -0500, Glenn Morton wrote:
>There is a report in Cell which I don't have) that Neanderthal DNA has been
>isloated. The short note I ran across at:
>
>http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/html/970710a.htm
>
>said that it shows that Neanderthals left no descendants. I will say that
>if this work holds up to scrutiny, it does not impact the humanity or lack
>there of for the Neanderthal. None of the inhabitants of the Norse colony
>on Greenland have left any descendants on today's earth either nor did the
>children killed on the Titanic leave any descendants, but they were fully human.
It is irrelevant whether "Neanderthals left no descendants" to the
question whether they were "fully human". The point is that they
were only distantly related to Homo sapiens.
Your own source says that "Neandertals were an evolutionary dead end
rather than our ancestors":
"A stunning, first-ever analysis of DNA from a Neandertal bone
supports the view that Neandertals were an evolutionary dead end
rather than our ancestors...The team found mutations in stretches of
the DNA that never vary among modern humans, which pegged the DNA as
ancient. When they compared the Neandertal sequence with 986
distinct sequences from living humans, they found that the ancient
DNA was three times more different than modern human sequences. That
puts the Neandertal sequence outside the statistical range of modern
human variation and, says Paabo, makes it "highly unlikely that
Neandertals contributed to the human mtDNA pool." In fact, it
suggests a deeply rooted split in the human family tree, says
paleoanthropologist Christopher Stringer of The Natural History
Museum in London. The finding implies that the two lineages diverged
before the first known Neandertal at about 300,000 years ago, and
long before the first modern humans at less than 200,000 years ago.
That, he says, supports the "Out of Africa" hypothesis that modern
humans arose recently in Africa and then replaced existing human
populations around the world, including the European Neandertals,
without interbreeding with them. Others, such as paleoanthropologist
Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, aren't
convinced that DNA from one individual settles the long-standing
debate over modern human origins."
(http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/html/970710a.htm
Here is another from Time magazine's web site which says that "the
two species (modern man and Neanderthals) have almost nothing in
common, genetically speaking":
"Anthropologists have long known that modern man and the brawny,
heavier-browed creatures known as Neanderthals coexisted on the
planet for tens of thousands of years. What they don't know is how
the two species got along. Did they interbreed, as some scientists
contend, producing among their descendants the people who now
populate Europe? Or did they compete for food and shelter, with
Neanderthals eventually losing the struggle and disappearing for good
30,000 years ago? A landmark report in last week's issue of the
journal Cell suggests that whatever else Homo sapiens and
Neanderthals did, they probably did not make love. In a tour de force
experiment that involved extracting a microscopic strand of ancient
DNA from the arm bone of a Neanderthal skeleton, a team led by Dr.
Svante Paabo of the University of Munich showed that the two
species have almost nothing in common, genetically speaking. All
living creatures share a certain genetic heritage. But comparing a
378-unit sequence of DNA taken from mitochondria within a
Neanderthal cell to modern DNA, Paabo's team found striking
differences. Contemporary humans differ from one another by an
average of eight variations in that sequence. The Neanderthal
specimen differed in 27 places. By comparison, there are only 55
differences between modern humans and chimpanzees. This suggests
that Neanderthals split off from the human family tree quite a bit
earlier than most scientists believed. The ancestral population of all
modern humans is thought to have emerged about 150,000 years ago.
Humans and chimps diverged at least 4 million years earlier. Based on
the new DNA study, our ancestors and Neanderthals split up about
550,000 to 690,000 years ago--and were never reconciled."
(http://www.pathfinder.com/@@jiGIFAYAYOf4j5bT/time/magazine
/1997/dom/9707 21/science.no_sex_please.html)
If Neanderthal Man was not our ancestor, but only a very distant
cousin, then all your attempts to show similarities between
Neanderthal and Homo sapiens are interesting but theologically
irrelevant.
God bless.
Steve
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