On Tue, 30 Dec 1997 18:38:35 -0600, Glenn Morton wrote:
[...]
>SJ>Your original point was that the carved skull was evidence of ritual
>>cannibalism. Yet now you admit that there could have been
>>cannibalism without carving the skull, ie. by extracting the brain
>>through the neck. Equally, there is no reason why there could have
>>been carving of the skull without cannibalism, eg. carving the skull
>>for utilitarian puposes-a bowl. Why then does carving the skull have
>>anything necessarily to do with cannibalism in general, and ritual
>>cannibalism in particular?
GM>Steve, I don't know what your point is here. They carved the skull. They
>didn't do it the simple way. You seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing.
My "point" is that your original claim that: "... if this object
represents some time of ritual cannibalism then it would be
indicative of religion among the Neanderthals..."(Wed, 17 Dec 1997,
Re: anthropological news), is not supported by the evidence. All
you have evidence of is a carved skull-nothing more.
[...]
>SJ>I take it then that the original article does not actually say that
>>the range of 22-26 nucleotide differences was an "experimental
>>error". Did any anthropologist on the Anthro E-mail news agree with
>>you that this range is correctly termed an "experimental error"?
GM>Steve, I do tire of your word games where you insist that somebody say the
>precise word that you desire or you will not believe anybody. If this is
>the best you can do in argumentation, then let's not go further.
OK. But it was *your* "word games", coining the words "experimental
error", when it appears the original Cell article did not use it, in
order to discredit the study which found that neandertals and modern
humans are probably only distantly related.
[...]
>>GM>Good But averages are averages it is the range that is important.
>SJ>The SCIENCE and NATURE articles seem to think that the *averages*
>>were more important. Besides, if the ranges are "experimental
>>errors" (according to you) why do you claim they are more important
>>than the averages which are not?
GM>The Science and Nature articles are not the original source. I don't care
>what they think or thought.
It is noteworthy that you "don't care" what the world's two leading
science journals (SCIENCE and NATURE) think about the use of
averages instead of ranges? Do you also not care that "the original
source" (CELL) also thinks the averages were more important?
Besides, you just ignored my question as to why do you insist that
the ranges were more important than the averages, when the former
were (according to you) "experimental errors"?
[...]
>SJ>Thanks. Now why is this "range of the individual measurements"
>>necessarily "experimental errors"? Are you claiming that one
>>scientist looked at a string of mtDNA and found 22 differences
>>between it and the reference string of human mtDNA, and another
>>scientist looked at the exact same strings and found 36 differences,
>>and that therefore one or both of them were in error to the tune of
>>*14* differences?
GM>When you read the original report and not just the derivative reports you
>will find that they ran the experiment many times with different results.
>Sometimes they saw only 22 differences sometimes they found more.
Thanks. I have ordered the CELL article some weeks ago. I will get
back to you when I have read it in full.
[...]
>>GM>No one criticised it.
>SJ>I take it therefore that no one positively endorsed it either? If
>>this was the case then it seems that your claim was simply ignored?
GM>Wrong, Milford Wolpoff did.
If Wolpoff positively endorsed your claim, I would appreciate a
quote of what he actually said, and more importantly, what he is
going to do about it, since if true, it would largely invalidate the
study, and be a good defence of his multiregional continuity
hypothesis. I tried to look at the Neanderthal message board URL
you gave as www.origins.pro-am.com/origins, but it did not seem to
work for me.
Happy new year!
Steve
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