Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => Off Topic => Topic started by: PaleoPhil on October 23, 2014, 09:30:51 am
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"Scientists have long suspected that modern humans and our ancient Neanderthal cousins interbred, and now DNA evidence shows that it did occur, and dates when it occurred, researchers say. ..."
More at: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/18480/20141022/dna-of-found-in-early-modern-human-fossil-shows-evidence-of-interbreeding-with-neanderthals.htm (http://www.techtimes.com/articles/18480/20141022/dna-of-found-in-early-modern-human-fossil-shows-evidence-of-interbreeding-with-neanderthals.htm)
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Probably needs a more comic book presentation for appreciation.
Some sort of family tree schematic.
Where did the neanderthals come from?
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I am not convinced of their dates since it is a blatant, biased attempt to protect the Out of Africa theory which took a very severe beating once one of its two central tenets(that no humans ever interbred with Neanderthals or Homo Erectus or Homo Denisovans or whatever). Besides, DNA analysis is so new that constant errors come up with people mostly making wild, unproven guesses/estimates. What I find unlikely is the OoA notion of modern humans coming out of Africa only c.50,000 years ago, after aeons of isolation from the rest of the world, and then still being able to interbreed with the Neanderthals despite the Neanderthals being geographically isolated from Africa for hundreds of thousands of years(since 800,000 to 2,000,000 years ago). Now, the multiregional hypothesis, by contrast, states that there was constant gene-flow between populations all over the globe with dna-transfer shifting back to populations in Africa as well as elsewhere. That makes more sense, really than a purely out of Africa claim.
Now that we know more about the Neanderthals, their latin name(homo sapiens neanderthalis) should really become at least "homo sapiens sapiens neanderthalis", or perhaps even "homo sapiens sapientior neanderthalis".