DEBUNKING THE THEORY THAT OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS WERE THE NEANDERTHALS - I like to debunk theories and I do it often, today we will debunk the theory about what our ancestors looked like, at first I saw these conclusions very loosely but if you think about it a bit and the my theory is correct, its conclusion is shockingly creepy!!!
THEORY UNDER RESEARCH - INITIAL CONCLUSIONS ONLY
If humans are from neanderthals why when they do a "*factory reset" do they look like the kids in the picture?
*If the DNA is damaged, the creator reads the old BACKUP DNA and if this happens, all people who have this happen to them ( DNA damage and BACKUP DNA run ) are born with the same appearance as if they were twins. (Wherever they are on the planet)
Have you ever wondered why?
The answer is obvious: this was the original DNA of humans. so were our ancient ancestors. and these children have their DNA. We don't need to look for ancient excavations. the originals (first created) live among us.
Ioannis Theodorakis - https://yourss365.blogspot.com
The Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia from over 200,000 years ago until (in some areas) less than 30,000 years ago. If this question had been asked 20 years ago, the majority of experts would probably have answered yes, but new data and research have shown that our species Homo sapiens originated in Africa during the last 250,000 years from non-Neanderthal ancestors. Our species spread from Africa during the last 60,000 years, and apparently replaced other human lines such as the Neanderthals. How this replacement happened - through conflict or competition - is still unclear, as is what happened when populations of our species encountered the Neanderthals.
Although I regard Homo neanderthalensis as a separate species - based on their distinctive anatomy - the Neanderthals were clearly closely related to us. Thus, as may occur with other closely-related species, interbreeding might have happened. Then the question takes on a different meaning, at a much finer level of resolution. While we didn't descend from the Neanderthals through an evolutionary transformation, if there was interbreeding, some of us today (particularly in Eurasia) might have Neanderthal-derived genes. However, my reading of the fossil and genetic data (the latter including some Neanderthal DNA) suggests that any Neanderthal contribution was vanishingly small. So I would still say that the answer, in any meaningful sense, is no.
Why did the Neanderthals go extinct?
Τhe species does not exist today – it might help the future of homo-sapiens to understand why.
Aarathai Prasad Asked by: Kevin Simpson, Durham
The spread of modern humans across Europe is associated with the demise and ultimate extinction of Neanderthal populations 40,000 years ago, likely due to competition for resources.
While the jury is still out on whether or not Neanderthals and modern humans differed in cognition, the ability of a small number of humans to replace a larger population of Neanderthals may have been due to a higher level of culture – our power to develop and pass on knowledge of better tools, better clothing, or better economic organisation.
Interbreeding may also have lent us an advantage. Between 1 and 4 per cent of the DNA of all living humans (except sub-Saharan Africans) is Neanderthal in origin.
Are Neanderthals the same species as us
Museum human evolution expert Prof Chris Stringer, who has been studying Neanderthals and early modern humans for about 50 years, tackles the big question of whether we belong to the same species.
Everyone on the planet today, whatever they look like and wherever they live, is classified by biologists in the species Homo sapiens. But some commentators are now suggesting that the extinct Neanderthals with their heavy brows and big noses should be classified in our species as well.
So what defines our species, and who qualifies to join the club?
So what defines our species, and who qualifies to join the club?
An expanding family tree
When I drew up a family tree covering the last one million years of human evolution in 2003, it contained only four species: Homo sapiens (us, modern humans), H. neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals), H. heidelbergensis (a supposedly ancestral species), and H. erectus (an even more ancient and primitive species). I have just published a new diagram covering the same period of time and it shows more than double the number of species, including at least four that were around in the last 100,000 years.
When I drew up a family tree covering the last one million years of human evolution in 2003, it contained only four species: Homo sapiens (us, modern humans), H. neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals), H. heidelbergensis (a supposedly ancestral species), and H. erectus (an even more ancient and primitive species). I have just published a new diagram covering the same period of time and it shows more than double the number of species, including at least four that were around in the last 100,000 years.
Scientists currently recognise as many as nine human species from the past one million years, including the recently discovered Homo luzonensis, which was announced in April 2019. This diagram showing their inferred age ranges was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science in August 2019.
Named by Linnaeus
Our species name (which means 'wise humans' - though we might question the wisdom of that name today) was given to us by that great Swedish classifier Carl Linnaeus in 1758. In those pre-evolutionary times, species were usually considered to be fixed identities, created by God.
Grouping living things in species allows biologists to study aspects of life ranging from our own evolutionary history to the conservation of rain forests in the Amazon.
Today we still recognise each species by its own special features.
The physical traits of Homo sapiens include a high and rounded ('globular') braincase, and a relatively narrow pelvis.
Measurement of our braincase and pelvic shape can reliably separate a modern human from a Neanderthal - their fossils exhibit a longer, lower skull and a wider pelvis.
Even the three tiny bones of our middle ear, vital in hearing, can be readily distinguished from those of Neanderthals with careful measurement. In fact the shape differences in the ear bones are more marked, on average, than those that distinguish our closest living relatives - chimpanzees and gorillas - from each other.
Comparison of Neanderthal (left) and modern human (right) skulls, from a display in Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Adapted from a derivative work by DrMikeBaxter (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons.
Pronounced differences in the braincase, ear bones and pelvis can still be recognised in fossils of Neanderthals and modern humans from 100,000 years ago. This suggests a separate evolutionary history going back much further - so far so good for differentiating H. neanderthalensis from H. sapiens.
Complications come when we consider a particular definition of species - one which Linnaeus did not develop, but which he probably would have appreciated.
The biological species concept
The biological species concept states that species are reproductively isolated entities - that is, they breed within themselves but not with other species. Thus all living Homo sapiens have the potential to breed with each other, but could not successfully interbreed with gorillas or chimpanzees, our closest living relatives.
On this basis, 'species' that interbreed with each other cannot actually be distinct species.
Critics who disagree that H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens are two separate species can now cite supporting evidence from recent genetic research. This indicates that the two interbred with each other when they met outside Africa about 55,000 years ago. As a result, everyone today whose ancestors lived outside Africa at that time has inherited a small but significant amount of Neanderthal DNA, which makes up about 2% of their genomes.
The Neanderthal in us ?
I still believe they are distinct species
In the face of this seemingly decisive evidence, why do I cling to my belief that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are distinct species?
Well, in my view the problem is not with ancient couplings between our ancestors and Neanderthals, but with the limitations of the biological species concept.
We now know from the same kind of genomic research that many other species of mammal interbreed with each other - for example different kinds of baboons (genus Papio), wolves and wild dogs (Canis), bears (Ursus) and large cats (Panthera). In addition, one recent estimate suggests that at least 16% of all bird species interbreed with each other in the wild.
A puma-leopard hybrid. You can see this specimen on display at the Museum at Tring. We now know that many mammal species can interbreed.
Thus the problem is not with Neanderthals and modern humans and all the other species that interbreed with each other, but with the biological species concept itself. It is only one of dozens of suggested species concepts, and one that is less useful in the genomic age, with its profuse demonstrations of inter-species mixing. The reality is that in most cases in mammals and birds, species diverge from each other gradually. It may take millions of years for full reproductive isolation to develop, something that clearly had not yet occurred for H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens.In my view, if Neanderthals and Homo sapiens remained separate long enough to evolve such distinctive skull shapes, pelvises, and ear bones, they can be regarded as different species, interbreeding or not.
Humans are great classifiers, and we do like to keep things orderly. But we should not be surprised when the natural world (past and present) does not match up to our neat and simple schemes.
Behaviour is irrelevant here
But what about the archaeological evidence that is also commonly cited in favour of uniting the Neanderthals with us as Homo sapiens - that they had 'cultural' behaviours such as burying their dead and painting designs on the walls of caves?
Well, interesting as that is, it should be excluded from the biological classification of species, since behaviours are potentially more plastic, evolve more quickly, and spread more easily within and between species than traits based on anatomy and DNA.
If modern humans are the descendants of Neanderthals, why do we look so different?
Neanderthals were as human as we are, but slightly different from what we call “modern” humans. They were a bit shorter and stockier, with a longer ribcage, and their hands were better at strong grasping of things like spear-shafts, and not so good at fine manipulation. They had large brains - slightly larger than ours - but their skulls were swept back so they had less volume above the brows and more at the back of the head. They had almost no chin, and their eyes were deep-set below heavy brows, which probably protected their eyes if they got kicked in the face by the large animals they hunted (the swept-back skull may also have protected them from being kicked in the temples). They had large, rounded noses to warm up the air they breathed in snowy regions, and we think their voice-boxes were a bit different from ours, giving them rather squeaky voices.
These are both Europeans, but there were Neanderthals and/or Denisovans in Asia, and a couple of related groups in Africa, who would have been darker. [And as I’ve been reminded, it’s unlikely white Neanderthals and white moderns would have met, because the first modern humans into Europe were dark, and probably didn’t develop pale skin until after pure-bred Neanderthals became extinct.
- In the most recent and mathematically rigorous study to date determining whether Neanderthals contributed to the evolution of modern humans, a team of anthropologists examining the skulls of modern humans and Neanderthals as well as 11 existing species of non-human primates found strong evidence that Neanderthals differ so greatly from Homo sapiens as to constitute a different species.
- In the most recent and mathematically rigorous study to date determining whether Neanderthals contributed to the evolution of modern humans, a team of anthropologists examining the skulls of modern humans and Neanderthals as well as 11 existing species of non-human primates found strong evidence that Neanderthals differ so greatly from Homo sapiens as to constitute a different species.
- The scientists, led by Katerina Harvati of New York University, used a new technique known as geometric morphometrics to measure the degree of variation between and amongst living primate species, represented by over 1000 specimens.
- The data used included Neanderthal fossils , Upper Paleolithic European modern human fossils, and recent human populations, as well as data from living African apes and Old World Monkeys.
- "The only way we could effectively do this was to examine the skeletal morphology of living species today and come up with models.
- The data also showed that the difference between Neanderthals and modern humans was as great or greater than that found between closely related primate species.
- "What the data give us is a robust analysis of a widely representative sample of primates, and provides the most concrete evidence to date that Neanderthals are indeed a separate species within the genus Homo," Harvati added.
- The PNAS paper, entitled "Neanderthal taxonomy reconsidered: Implications of 3D primate models of intra- and interspecific differences," was co-authored by Stephen R. Frost of New York College of Osteopathic Medicine at the New York Institute of Technology and Kieran P. McNulty of Baylor University, and will be available on their website the week of January 26-30, 2004.
Meyer M, Kircher M, Gansauge MT, Li H, Racimo F, Mallick S, Schraiber JG, Jay F, Prüfer K, de Filippo C, Sudmant PH, Alkan C, Fu Q, Do R, Rohland N, Tandon A, Siebauer M, Green RE, Bryc K, Briggs AW, Stenzel U, Dabney J, Shendure J, Kitzman J, Hammer MF, Shunkov MV, Derevianko AP, Patterson N, Andrés AM, Eichler EE, Slatkin M, Reich D, Kelso J, Pääbo S. A high-coverage genome sequence from an archaic Denisovan individual. Science. 2012 Oct 12;338(6104):222-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1224344. Epub 2012 Aug 30. PubMed: 22936568; Free full-text article from PubMed Central: PMC3617501.
Pääbo S. The diverse origins of the human gene pool. Nat Rev Genet. 2015 Jun;16(6):313-4. doi: 10.1038/nrg3954. PubMed: 25982166.
Sankararaman S, Mallick S, Dannemann M, Prüfer K, Kelso J, Pääbo S, Patterson N, Reich D. The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans. Nature. 2014 Mar 20;507(7492):354-7. doi: 10.1038/nature12961. Epub 2014 Jan 29. PubMed: 24476815. Free full-text article from PubMed Central: PMC4072735.
Skov L, Coll Macià M, Sveinbjörnsson G, Mafessoni F, Lucotte EA, Einarsdóttir MS, Jonsson H, Halldorsson B, Gudbjartsson DF, Helgason A, Schierup MH, Stefansson K. The nature of Neanderthal introgression revealed by 27,566 Icelandic genomes. Nature. 2020 Jun;582(7810):78-83. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2225-9. Epub 2020 Apr 22. PubMed: 32494067.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/why-did-the-neanderthals-go-extinct
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species-as-us.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4813IYxSYc&list=TLGGAPNTTdKCQmQxNjA3MjAyNA
https://www.quora.com/If-modern-humans-are-the-descendants-of-Neanderthals-why-do-we-look-so-different
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/01/040127085316.htm
https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-and-modern-humans-made-babies-47-000-years-ago
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.html
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