Racial Evolution 101

Hi!
I’m from Romania and I have a question for you.Recently because of genetics and molecular biology, the scientist declare that Neanderthal Man is a different species from Homo sapiens sapiens (descendents of modern humans).
Evidence discover by archeologists show that Neanderthal man can handle fire, create and use tools, create clothes, create colored paintings on the walls of caves, buried their dead.
Even we reject genetics, only judging after the skulls or bones found by archeologists, we must admit that they look highly different from humans.
So we must conclude that they are an intelligent species different from humans.Now, I want to ask you, in Creation theory, who create those intelligent species?

>Now, I want to ask you, in Creation theory, who create those intelligent species?Christians have different views of what Neanderthals amount to. Some view them as the chldren of Cain, I'd tend to view them as protohuman lords of some previous creation. DNA studies have shown them to have made no detectable contribution to the genetic pool of modern man. Their DNA is described as "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", thus explaining the previously mysterious lack of any evidence of interbreeding since we could no more interbreed with something like that than we could with horses.All of that kills off any notion of modern humans having evolved since all other hominids are much further removed from us than the neanderthal. To go on believing that modern man evolved, you'd have to come up with some new hominid closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal and the works and remains of such a creature would be all over the map and very easy to find if he'd ever existed; nonetheless nothing like that exists.The three possibilities you're left with are that1 modern man was created here from scratch.
2 modern man was brought here from somewhere else.
3 modern man was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthalAs to who created the neanderthal, there's no simple answer.Creation stories in antique literature including Genesis invariably amount to stories of the creation of our own planet and local solar-system environment, and not the entire universe. Often some idea of catastrophe and renewal is involved, as when Isaiah speaks of the new heavens and the new Earth, meaning as they appear now versus how they appeared two or three years ago.Adam and Eve were real people and were probably the leaders of some small group of survivers after some ancient calamity we don't even read about and the notion of first people might conceivably mean "first such as us", i.e. first modern people as opposed to neanderthals.

of course that you would be closer genetically to your brother or sister than you would be to your grandparents wouldn't have anything to do with the logic you use.Guess you didn't have any grandparents and were spontaneously generated.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

As a Christian, I view Neanderthals as....Neanderthals. They were only one other line of Hominids. At some distant time in the past, both we and the Neaderthal had common ancestors.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

of course that you would be closer genetically to your brother or sister than you would be to your grandparents wouldn't have anything to do with the logic you use.

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Guess you didn't have any grandparents and were spontaneously generated.

Guess you never took anything resembling a course in basic logic.

The logic is yours -- just applied close to home. enjoy it.The reason that Neanderthal DNA is close to ours is because we are closely related. The reason it is closer to ours than chimps or bonobos is because we are more closely related.Last I heard there were no DNA samples for any other prehistoric hominids, so your going on about the relationship being cut off is pure hokum.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

I've heard things that, for me, bring this finding into doubt. For instance that, as part of the research methodology, they eliminated any results that were too close to human DNA, on the assumption that they represented laboratory contamination.Under that circumstance it would seem to be no wonder that they found no "detectable contribution", because any time they did find such a contribution, they rejected it as a contaminant.Can anyone speak to this?

Last I heard there were no DNA samples for any other prehistoric hominids, so your going on about the relationship being cut off is pure hokum.

Jay Matternes Reconstruction of a neanderthal

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A fairly reasonable reconstruction of a homo erectus (the next closest hominid):
Neanderthal skull:
Homo erectus skull:
Basically, the further back you go, the worse it gets.

Wow. Homo Erectus is hung like an elf.I guess it's just a clever name...

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"As the days go by, we face the increasing inevitability that we are alone in a godless, uninhabited, hostile and meaningless universe. Still, you've got to laugh, haven't you?"
-Holly

Read the first answer.
There you will find a better explanation from creation point of view.The problem is that human and Neanderthals are different intelligent species.
Admitting that we can find a Neanderthal today, he can’t interbreed with human, as human can’t interbreed with chimps.
That has nothing to do with my sister or with my mother or with a person from Africa because we are the same.So the question was, if GOD create us as intelligent species from HIS appearance, who create Neanderthal who are different?scrap from an Internet encyclopedia:Since the mid 1990 there has been a remarkable convergence of views about the evolution of hommo sapiens amongst paleoanthropologists, geneticists and molecular biologists.
This convergence is the subject of books such as Steve Olsen's Mapping Human History. This modern synthesis is also remarkable for its specificity. For example, there is strong scientific evidence supporting these conclusions:around 2 to 2.5 million years ago, the genus.Homo first appeared;
about 7,500 generations have passed since the appearance of modern humans;
every person alive today is descended from a relatively small group of individuals living in Africa sometime between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago;There is ongoing debate over whether "Neanderthal Man" was a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. , or a subspecies of H. sapiens. While the debate remains unsettled, the preponderance of evidence, collected by examining mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomal, currently indicates that there was no gene flow between H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens, and therefore the two were separate species.URL: Evolution of homo sapiens | Article about Evolution of homo sapiens by The Free Dictionary

Notice the lack of canines in both skulls. Nice laugh on the Homo erectus, makes me think of some comedians on TV. I see no problem with this trend in the skulls, but point out that you also seem to be missing something in the scheme:http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.html or from a different site:
http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/evol.html The first column is Homo sap (descending from Homo heidelburg), the second is Homo heidelburg (descending from Homo ergaster), the third is Homo neander (also descending from Homo heidelburg, but earlier), and then on the right is Homo erectus (also descending from Homo ergaster, but earlier)So your tree is off the mark, erectus is more second cousin than ancestor.From your picture of Homo Erectus I think he would fit in without much notice in modern society when you consider the diversity of types from aboriginal to blacks to asian to caucasian: Nice family eh?I don't know what you mean by "Basically, the further back you go, the worse it gets" unless you are saying that the further you go back in time the less modern the specimens look (doh!) or that your biases and prejudices are showing.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

You are confusing opinion with evidence.I am not disputing that neanderthal was a different species, or that homo erectus or homo egaster were different species. You can see my response to redwolf on this issue at message #56in this topic (right after yours). Certainly the discovery of anatomically modern humans in Ethiopia that date to 160,000 years old show a long overlap in time when Homo sap and Homo neander lived.There are genetic differences between you, your sister or your mother or a person from Africa. The differences between you and the person in Africa are greater than the differences between you and your sister or your mother. There are also differences between you and your ancestors that increase as you go back in time. It does not take long for the differences in your ancestor DNA to be as great as the differences between you and the person in Africa. Go back far enough and you will find one (if not several) common ancestors between you and the person in Africa (I am related 4 different ways to a single person on the Mayflower). And Homo erectus who also lived at the same time for a while ... and maybe even some Homo ergaster cousins (see Dmanisi, hominids in europe found above a 1.85 million year old lava flow). Seems to me that is a question for you to answer rather than ask. Again, this is conflating opinion (incredulity?) with evidence. For me it is fairly obvious that they all come from the same source, as shown by the fossil evidence.There are many species in other families, why should we feel we need to be special? There are even some scientists that are now saying that chimpanzees and Bonobos should be in the Homo family instead of Pan. This may also mean pushing back the original debut of the Homo family to earlier than 2 million years ago.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

While it is still too early to say for sure, what I have seen so far seems to show that the Chimp and the Bonobos will very likely soon be included in the family. Frankly, knowing some of my kith and kin, I think that overall it will be an improvement.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

>around 2 to 2.5 million years ago, the genus.Homo first appeared...Gunnar Heinsohn is one of Europe's best scholars and one of the main players in the ongoing effort to reconstruct the chronologies of the ancient near east.Heinsohn's comments on the major neanderthal excavations in Europe:Heinsohn comments:Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as followsmodern man (homo sapiens sapiens)Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:monostrat.: only modern man's toolsinterstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by sidemonostrat.: only Neanderthal man's toolsinterstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by sidemonotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism. This "most misleading Englishman" (Velikovsky) needed millions of years to let invisibly small alterations do the big visible changes. It is quite funny to observe catastrophism combined with darwinizing time spans. Yet, I see it all over neo-Catastrophism.

Neanderthals are supposed to have died out 50,000 years ago; another one of
these standard time frames based upon projecting present conditions and
processes into the distant past.

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The best reconstructions of neanderthals I've seen are those of Jay Matternes',
which appeared in the Oct.
81 issue of "Science". Scientists had known for some time that the standard
reconstructions were based entirely on early, arthritic skeletons, but
nobody had really done a serious job of reconstructing an image of these
people from more recent evidence.First time I saw Matternes' drawings, I thought "Gee, I've seen that guy somewhere
or other before..."Sir Mortimer Wheeler "Civilizations of the Indus Valley and Beyond notes that
the physical type noted, which he calls a "priest/king type" appears in statues
along with other images more easily recognizable as modern people, and assumes
that the type shown is non-representational art.Somebody may have forgotten to tell the artists and sculptors of Harappa and
Mohenjo Daro (about 1500 BC) about the 50,000 year thing...Again, despite looking much like us, neanderthals were vastly different genetically.
Their DNA has been described as "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee",
cleanly eliminating them as a plausible ancestor for modern man.