Neanderthal News

[Manystones]

Loosely on the topic of Neanderthal or indeed Homo erectus having the ability to use language.

How Language Works, J. Humphrys, Penguin, 2006:

The primate vocal tract is very different from that found in humans. Primates have long, flat, thin tongues, which have less room to move. Their larynx is higher, and there is little sign of a pharynx. They are unable to change the configurations of the vocal tract to produce the range of sounds required in speech. In the course of evolution, posture became erect and the head moved forward. The larynx descended and the long, flexible pharynx developed. The result is the human ability to make a wide range of sounds - but at a cost of less efficient breathing, chewing, and swallowing. We can choke from food lodged in the larynx; monkeys cannot.

My highlighting.

Quite a trade-off (without counting the inevitable deaths). Another example of a "similar" mutation in response to the environment?

In a separate study, published in the journal Current Biology, Dr Lalueza-Fox and colleagues extracted the DNA sequence for a gene called FoxP2 from Neanderthals.

Modern people have several changes in this gene that are absent in our relatives the chimpanzees. This suggests that FoxP2 may have been an important gene in the evolution of language, something which separates us from the great apes.

The researchers found that Neanderthals shared these key mutations in FoxP2 with modern humans, suggesting they had some of the prerequisites for language and speech.

[Manystones]

Min,

I didn't see your post....

I don't mean to "toe the party line", I just feel that it is always possible to look at these things without inferring too much from them.

I note your remarks carefully and honestly don't necessarily form an opinion one way or another in this arena...

Another way to consider this though is that we are talking hundreds of thousands of years, millions even? For instance the news recently possibly extending our ancestory by several factors. Anything could have happened in this time and I am aware that we are just examining a fraction of the past with less than conclusive methods.

[Minimalist]

Oh, understood Richard. The whole point of this board is to discuss these ideas. No point in holding back.

There was a line in R/S's piece about melanoma. While not a desirable trait, the fact is that natural selection works by killing off a less successful being before it has a chance to reproduce. Something like melanoma, which takes a while to develop, does not seem to fall in to that category.
By the time a male with a tendency to develop melanoma actually dies of it there is no telling how many offspring he could have fathered. Same goes for arthritis, and going bald, and erectile dysfunction, I suppose.

If dark skin color prevented the intake of vitamin D the effect would be immediate and the organism would never live long enough to reproduce in the first place but it does not do so. It is merely less efficient. Hence, a slave could be captured on the Ivory Coast, be transported to Alabama and then immediately flee to Canada and not suffer from a vitamin D deficiency. More important, absent interbreeding with Whites, his offspring 500 years later would not have to "evolve" in order to make use of Canada's National Health Care system.

[Beagle]

Where do the Orientals or American Indians fit in to this idea?

From a multi-regional perspective Asians and Native Americans have the same basic skeletal type. Just using basic skull features as an example (and there are many), Asians have a brachycephalic skull (meaning rounded), Caucasians have a doliocephalic skull type (meaning long and narrow), and Africans have mesomorphic skulls (in the middle). There is more variability among Africans than the others. Forensic pathologists can usually readily identify the race of a skeleton by the skull alone.

A long time ago, I posted about femurs - I'll try to find it and copy & paste.

The most significant fact about skeletal differences (to me) is that the pre-HSS people in these regions showed the same differences.

[fossiltrader]

Beagle there one RACE it called the human we havent used the term race in years you could say ethnology that more accepted try to keep up tp date old mate.

[Beagle]

Check again FT. The only time I used the word Race was a page ago when I stated that there was no race gene.

[Beagle]

Forensic pathologists can usually readily identify the race of a skeleton by the skull alone.

Whoops, that's not quite true.

[Rokcet Scientist]

American Blacks were brought out of the tropics beginning 5 centuries ago. They remain Black.

Having lived in and travelled extensively across Africa, as well as having travelled the States extensively, I have to disagree: on average American negroids are definitely a couple tints lighter 'shades of black' than African negroids.

[Minimalist]

Impossible to discount the effect of Massa' heading down to the slave quarters for an evening quickie, R/S.

[kbs2244]

I grew up with an "African American" with red curly hair and freckles.
The joke in his family was "There must have been an Irishman in the woodpile somewhere."
They still concidered themselves "Black."

[Minimalist]

http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus ... 31388.html

"The study enabled us to verify that the Neanderthals evolved these features independently of homo sapiens," said Florence University's David Caramelli, who led the Italian part of the research.

"We can therefore rule out any possible interbreeding between the two species," he said.

"The surprising thing is that there was a sort of evolutionary convergence in two species, independently of each other," Caramelli said.

The study, which appears in Friday's edition of the journal Science, comes less than a year after two leading US research groups came to opposing conclusions about the interbreeding question.

Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antrhopology is currently trying to settle the issue by deciphering the Neanderthal genome.

And on it goes................

[Beagle]

"We can therefore rule out any possible interbreeding between the two species,"

Can you imagine the uproar in this forum that would occur if one of us made a lameass statement like this?

So the red hair gene in HNS is not the same one that causes red headedness 50,000 yrs. later. He doesn't seem to know about gene evolution/replacement and he clearly doesn't have a clue that this one gene has nothing to do with whether or not there was interbreeding.

Unfortunately I am able to predict that within a few weeks, there will be an article about a find in Africa that shows evidence of people eating fish, or using red ochre, or something like that, and the scientist will state that "this proves the Out of Africa Theory".

If they say things like this, what else might they do to "prove" their point?

[Minimalist]

<sigh>

http://www.fruitofthenile.com/ramses.htm

Ramses, like his father Seti I, had red hair and therefore was
associated with the god Set. Set had been scorned by most Egyptians
throughout their history.

Now....how did Ramesses and Seti get red hair.... Were they Neanderthals? Did they "magically" develop the same mutation in the heat of Egypt that the Neanderthals did in the cold of Germany? How is it that red hair was common enough in friggin' Egypt to be associated with any of their Gods? Was Set a Neanderthal who got lost and charmed the Ancient Egyptians with his wisdom and oratorical ability....or did he just grunt at them?

[Forum Monk]

Now....how did Ramesses and Seti get red hair....

Simple. They died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_color

Changes in hair color after death
The hair color of mummies or buried bodies can change over large time periods. Hair contains a mixture of black-brown-yellow eumelanin and red pheomelanin. Eumelanin is less chemically stable than pheomelanin and breaks down faster when oxidized. It is for this reason that Egyptian mummies have reddish hair. The color of hair changes faster under extreme conditions. It changes more slowly under dry oxidizing conditions (such as in burials in sand or in ice) than under wet reducing conditions (such as burials in wood or plaster coffins).[6]

I wish people who put up sites would dedicate a page to explaining who they are. Then we may judge the quality of information they cite. Especially when no corraborating links are provided.

[Minimalist]

Certainly Ramesses, who lived to damn near 90, died his hair in later life but a French study confirmed that his natural color was red.

Professor P. F. Ceccaldi, with a research team, studied some hairs from the mummy's scalp. Ramesses II was 87 years-old when he died, and his hair had turned white. Ceccaldi determined that the reddish-yellow color of the hair was due to a dye with a dilute henna solution. As we saw earlier, many Egyptians dyed their hair, and this personal habit was preserved by the embalmers. However, traces of the hair's original color remained in the roots. Microscopic examinations showed that the hair roots contained natural red pigments, and that therefore, during his younger days, Ramesses II had been a red head.

http://www.egyptorigins.org/ginger.htm

Apparently there are wall paintings of Thutmoses as a red-head as well...not to mention the blond haired commoner who is the title of the page. It seems there was a bit of variety among the Egyptians which is only interesting in that it seems, to me at least, to cast an aspersion of the idea that the red hair mutation only occurs in a cold climate.