Quicker Demise For Neanderthal?

[Minimalist]

And I think mankind had learned the "missionary" position before then.

Which reminds me of an old joke.


A missionary on a South Sea island is trying to teach English to his star pupil. As they walk around the missionary points to an object and speaks it's English name.


"Rock," says the missionary....pointing at a rock.


"Rock," says the student, pointing back.


"Tree," says the missionary....pointing at a tree.

"Tree." says the student....pointing back.


"Hut," says the missionary....pointing at a nearby hut.

"Hut," repeats the student....pointing at the hut.

As they walk by the hut, however, theystumble across two people making love.

Flustered and embarassed the missionary points and says "uhhhh....riding a bike."

The student picks up a big rock and bashes both of them in the head.

"What are you doing?" shrieks the missionary!

The student answers...."Him riding MY bike."

[Beagle]

[Minimalist]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 060106.php


DNA study on Neanderthal's....where is Daybrown when we need her?

The Neandertal sequence from Scladina confirms that Neandertals and modern humans were only distant relatives – Neandertal sequences are all closer to each other than to any known human sequence.

[Beagle]

Yeah, I was just reading the actual report earlier. Interesting.

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/nea ... a_dna.html


John Hawks has some additional comments.

[Beagle]

The real story will get a little clearer when we get a report on nuclear DNA.


[/quote]

Quote
Neanderthal DNA yields to genome foray.
Genetic material sequenced from 45,000-year-old male.
NATURE -- Published online: 16 May 2006

Rex Dalton

The first nuclear DNA sequences from a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) have been reported. The results should provide clues about when certain diseases, or traits such as hair or skin colour, arose. They also have geneticists excited about the idea of sequencing a Neanderthal genome.

Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began his Neanderthal Genome Project about two years ago. He and his team have probed 60 Neanderthal specimens from museums for hints that the DNA might have survived millennia of degradation. The species lived across Europe and western Asia from 300,000 to around 30,000 years ago, with the first specimen found in 1856 near Dusseldorf, Germany.

Two of the specimens showed promise, and on 12 May Pääbo's team reported at the Biology of Genomes meeting at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that they had managed to sequence around a million base pairs of nuclear DNA — around 0.03% of the genome — from one of them. This is a 45,000-year-old male specimen found in Vindija Cave outside Zagreb, Croatia.

[Minimalist]

This is a 45,000-year-old male specimen found in Vindija Cave outside Zagreb, Croatia.

Maybe he was a pyramid builder?

[Beagle]

In the interest of political correctness - I'll just

[Beagle]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5098748.stm

I meant to post this the other day, but we had some access problems.

Not too long ago the BBC posted a find about a 700kya ancestor - Heidelburgensis I think. There is an awful lot of very ancient finds coming out of the UK.

This article is about either a late HH or an early HN. For a region that far north, with human occupation for so long, emphasizes how much they must have evolved such cold weather adaptable bodies.

[Minimalist]

Was the Channel still dry land at this point?

[Beagle]

Without looking that up I don't know - but I know that the landbridge between the UK and the European mainland has been submerged and above sea level quite a few times in the last two million years.