Neanderthal theory.... many clues

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I have to admit this discussion confuses me more than a bit.

I thought that research into neanderthal genetics had established that neanderthals and homo sapiens were distinct and could not interbreed.

also, we have no idea what color people were when all these migrations were happening. they were most certainly not pale from what I've absorbed regarding the genetics of pigmentation, but assuming they were "black" because they came out of africa seems like a faulty assumption. maybe they were brown, or caramel.

Skin deep means little, the bones are all the same, only the teeth mark Moderns, and the tools found with them.

The classic Neanderthal head, brow ridges, occipital bun, are still found in modern humans, and through Africa in the past.

DNA studies have shown that the Neanderthal mother line, M DNA, is not in moderns, but there is no way to tell if males bred into the Modern line.

The best field work has been done in Israel, where Erectus, Neanderthal, and Moderns have been found living very close, and there is a lot of intermediate skulls that suggest interbreeding.

The last mutation was round heads being replaced by long heads in the Modern line. Long heads seem to be easier to give birth to larger skull babies.

Even more recent, skulls have gotten thinner, more plastic, all of which allows for larger brains being born, then growing rapidly after birth.

ASDs are said to produce larger heads, with faster brain growth in youth. Autism could be, "Tight Skull Syndrome". The brain starts to develop to a larger pattern, then runs out of space.

Which came first, larger brains, a long term trait of humans, or larger skulls, another long term trait?

Some skull models, round heads, thick skull walls, were not adaptable to larger brain development, others, long head, thin walls, were.

The very thing that drove long head development, would have most likely been fatal in Neanderthal. Modern father, Neanderthal mother, the children would have a thick round skull, and a pattern to develop a larger brain. Modern mother, Neanderthal father, would work.

The evidence is, Moderns that went north had a sudden growth spurt. Neanderthal had a larger brain, but when the two lines met, Cro Magnon suddenly appears. Males over two meters tall with a 1600 cc brain. That is 25% larger than current brains. It was a short lived peak, for brain size decreased afterward.

The line shows the sexual dimorphisn of humans, smaller women, so there might have been problems giving birth. Cro Magnon women who bred with smaller head males lived, as did their children. Even a 1% higher death rate in birth would account for large Cro Magon males being gone after a thousand years.

After they were gone, so were Neanderthal, Erectus, and only Moderns survived.

It is all one Species, one line, with some variations tried. Nature's way is to try lots of things, they all die, but some continue. It is not random, for small grass seed eating humans, us, are still developing Technology, Science, Intelligence, which after survival, is the main goal of our development.

The natural goal of our Species is to host the larger more developed brain. It is the one thing that has continued to develop over millions of years.

interesting hyphothesis.

it'll also be interesting to see what the next few years of research into the neanderthal genome finds. at this point there really is no genetic evidence of interbreeding, but also no hard genetic evidence against it.

however, this interview with Svante Pääbo introduces a level of doubt that I find appealing when he talks about genetic similarities between populations living within and populations established outside of africa:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paabo09 ... index.html

however, I won't commit myself to any particular belief until more work is done.

Savante has it right, when two groups meet the males of the dominate group produce children with the females of the other, who stay with their mother's group.

Neanderthal were the dominate group. They had been there a long time, had bigger brains, and their bones are three times as strong. Both larger and denser.

This is the time of The Human Explosion which ended the Paleolithic for a small group that started the Mesolithic. Besides better tools, clothes, art, they had the first large vocabulary language.

A vocabulary of six to eight hundred words does not change, that is enough words, and many island tribes show that many words going way back.

There is a language threshold, about twelve hundred words, then you find you need more. Indo European seems to be the first big language, and it spread over a wide area, Europe, Asia, India, China. Of course the local women had children with these talkative people, we still talk them out of their pants, the children stayed with them, the local vocabulary increased, and like magic, their eight hundred words, another four hundred borrowed words, and a new language is born that continues growing.

Following the pattern, they too spread to low language areas, and the Neanderthal contrabution to the DNA spread through most humans with the spread of complex language, about 35,000 years ago.

So we lack a clear baseline, the sample was contaminated by fast talking Neanderthal breeds, with flashy clothes, gifts of beads, strong drink, and we do have evidence of song, music, dancing. It was the Night Club version of sexual selection we still use.

While there are no records or recordings, we find enough musical instraments to show there were bands, singers, they toured, and took groupies back to the camp after the show.

Paleolithic girls are hot, they can dance, and who wants to talk?

Sativa means cultivated, and Cannibis Sativa was domesticated as Cannibis Indica about 35,000 years ago. In the heartland of Indo-European language.

These were the aids that spread Indo European language and Neanderthal genes.

Richard Rudgley got a Doctorate in the subject, and wrote, The Alchemy of Culture: Intoxicants in Society, Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, Wildest Dreams, whch study all the forms of intoxication in the early days.

The history of humans can only be understood by traditional values, Dope, Sex, and Rock and Roll.

sooooo. still confused.... why haven't the genetic differences between the neanderthal mixed populations been identified by their differences from the african genetic groups then? you think the differences will be found in a yet-unmapped area of the neanderthal genome?

Moderns show up in the near east, then spread. Modern traits, shovel shaped incisors then replace Erectus traits, round incisors, in Africa, so some went back.

The main driving force was, Moderns came north at the ending of an ice age, sea level was 150 meters lower, the Persian Gulf and Red Sea were dry valleys, densely populated, then the sea rose, and everyone sought dry land. That was about 35,000 years ago.

The loss of the two valleys would have sent a large number south as the north was undergoing a large and long flood, rivers raged as glaciers melted, and the hot dry lands were the safe place to go.

Modern traits spread over all of Africa then. Spreading ten miles a year, it would only take a few hundred years.

No place was safe from Neanderthal breeds with their boats and rock and roll.

Long ago European and Asian genetics reached the Americas, the Souix, Ojibway, and Norway share a line going back 15,000 years, and the Welsh have a lot of Native American genes from way back.

The bow and arrow was first recorded out of Africa in southern Spain, 13,000 years ago, by 12,000 years ago it had spread to the tip of South America.

Even in fairly recent times, flat boats came down from the Ohio River to New Orleans, sold the load, the boat for lumber, many houses built of barge boards, then they walked back up the Natchez Trace to Ohio, grew another crop, and built another boat. That is 1600 kilometers each way. it was a month's walk.

The Reindeer people wintered in Southern France, and the herd migrated to summer pasture, the Arctic Ocean past the Urals every year, thousands of kilometers.

People did not stay in one place, and the trade trails lead from salt, flint, obsidian, and reached the whole world.

The trade routes of 35,000 years ago reached the Baltic for Amber and seal oil, France for flint, Spain for Pyrites, Saltzburg, Austria for salt. Large sailing barges worked the Black Sea, the rivers that flow into it, and hides, antler, wood, were worked in centers and shipped.

There were seven weaves of cloth, including Herringbone Tweed, Textiles, fashion, traded far.

The next wave of ice came about 32,000 years ago and closed some trade routes and opened others. One was the Bering Land Bridge which was open for thousands of years. There is only slight evidence for people in the new world from that time, most came with the next wave of ice, 22,000 years ago.

We have a small and well mixed family tree.

By the extent and then isolation, the largest trace of Neanderthal DNA may be found in the Zulu, who inhabited the good lands of South Africa, where the advancing wave would stop, be DNA dense, and then isolated.

You might find pure Neanderthal DNA, but finding a pure human would be much harder.

Yes, it is a fanciful claim. It’s not particularly likely, and there is a lack of evidence to back it up. It’s an interesting but not particularly likely “just so” tale as matters stand.

It might be. In 1600 asserting human beings would land on the moon within 400 years, was a fanciful claim for which there was a lack of substantive evidence. None the less, that particular claim at that particular time, however fanciful, was actually factual, even though it was nothing that anyone could have had good cause to believe at the time.

Being right is actually rather irrelevant if you are right by chance rather than because you have gathered sufficient evidence to have good cause for your belief. If I state that right now it is raining somewhere in Japan, I am no more clever, astute, expert or analytically correct if this is true, than if it’s wrong, because I have no good cause to believe either way. Even if your fanciful claims are factually true, the reasons you give for believing that they are true, do not constitute good cause to believe as much, and so your wider claims remain fanciful, whether or not they are actually factual (something that actually cannot be determined at this time, as you would realize and admit if you were simultaneously objective, analyitically astute, and honest).

Humans were sufficiently adapted to their long term environments, as evidenced by their continued habitation of them.
None of which indicates any lack of success on the part of Southern living people.
I was not commenting on any such thing. If I were to comment on such matters, then I would certainly be inclined to suggest that Jarod Diamond’s explanation is much better than “because Out of Africa theories are wrong, and Autistic people are the descendents of Neanderthals”.


Yes they do.


Actually diversity within African ethnic groups, is sufficient to support claims of high diversity consistent with the “Out of Africa” theories.


You need to be more objective, and less dogmatic if you expect to be taken seriously when you present your claims.


Now you have gone from fanciful to absurd.

Wow, this might mean that the range of facial expressions that humans exhibit are limited to those that their faces can make! Imagine that!


Humans like ornaments. Well that proves that humans like ornaments. Magpies quite like shiny stuff. So do humans, I expect this proves bi polar mood disorders are actually perfectly useful magpie adaptations that occurred when our ancestors got confused over that “birds and the bees” euphemism?


Really, wow it’s almost as though humans are some kind of Ape. You’d almost think we were relatively closely related to other Great Apes who manifest this behavior too. In fact one might even be forgiven for suspecting that this is more strongly correlated to humans being primates than to Autistics being Neanderthals. But I guess you are welcome to invent your own far fetched and fanciful interpretations as you go along.

Do you think so?

Including the polygamous ones? And the (at least one) polyandrous one? How about the Nayar of South India, because that looks more like socially expected adultery to me.

If you are suggesting your little list constitutes such, that’s a load of rubbish. I’m personally very fond of beads, and I most certainly expect my partner to refrain from sexual relations with persons who are not myself.

Not really.

Not really.

Note that the utility of these competencies is not correlated to group size. The utility of this form of communication is as applicable to small group interactions as to large group interactions.
LOL, wrong again.

Grasping at straws would be an overly generous description of this line of “reasoning”.

Guess what? I am not a Neanderthal and I need to communicate effectively with other human beings, which is to say my co specifics. That you fancy that if Autistic traits were derived from Neanderthalic ancestors, that this would make our incapacities less impairing to us in our real every day lives, or (even more fancifully on your part) would not actually increase stigma attached to our condition, demonstrates how utterly removed from reality your views on these issues are.

Last edited by pandd on 01 Sep 2009, 5:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

Inventor, I totally missed it if you answered my questions.

Pandd, I think we just had a major breakdown in communication.

And, in relation to "fanciful claims", I can just say that if you / science don't want to investigate something, it does not mean it doesn't exist, but merely that you / autism researchers are not using the scientific approach, but rather are driven by PC doctrine.

IOW, you can scream all you want that this and that are just "fanciful claims", but until you can do something else than scream I'll simply just ignore your opinion.

It is ironic that you would claim it is the agendas/doctrine of others that cause them to view your Neanderthal opinions regarding Autism unlikely, when you have actually admitted that your purpose in arguing it is some agenda you are pushing regarding how you want Autism to be viewed.

Characterizing others as “screaming” because you are unable to respond to their points and the facts they present in a rational manner, draws attention to rather than distracts from the poverty of your knowledge, expertise and objectivity.

Whatever are you talking about? You stated that people do not mix with those outside their culture and that you believed this had been the case going back into pre history. It is quite clearly not the case at all, and yes I very much expect my caucasian ancestor was well aware of the ethnic diversity between himself and his Pacific Island bride.


I ask why if you think everyone originally “kept together” do you propose that this is evidence against the models that claim a lack of inter breeding?

Social constraints exist to prevent things that would happen without them. Things that occur in spite of social constraints against them, obviously are things that readily occur.

These traits are not conflicting in any biologically meaningful way.



Few thousand years? Whatever are you talking about, and why do you think that this is more of a problem for “Out of Africa” theories than for the “Multi regional” theories?


I have no idea where you heard that the pigment was different. It is not.
I have no idea what you think the relevance of the latter part of your statement is.


No, not at all.


So what if less than 100% of the population were effected? You think this is meaningful how exactly? Evidently, evidence from research suggests that in tropical regions, in the absence of modern medicines, approximately 100% of the population carries a high parasite load throughout their life cycle.


You should not let yourself become excessively focused on colour.

Genetic diversity is the relevant diversity in the context of the diversity we would expect if the “Out of Africa” theories were correct. You can babble on about skin and eye colour all you like, this does not make the peoples of the African continent any less genetically diverse.

That is not the case at all.

FYI, it was not the Neanderthal Theory that you called "fanciful claims", it was my assertion that nobody except NTs can communicate like NTs, neither animals nor Aspies. It was not even clear in your "rebuttal" why other species would be able to "talk NT" either.



As I wrote before, get the evidences that all species + Aspies are disabled because they cannot "talk NT". This IS a human-centered view that looks like a PC doctrine.

Thank you inventor.

at last someone open minded, well read and progressive in their quest for understanding the real nature of our evolution.

Thank you for contributing to this debate. Its nice to hear constructive input, rather than the usual debate for debate sake where is appears most people are only interested in trying to prove each other wrong and have ownership of the facts. Fact and truth are often mutually exclusive and have a fluid relationship; truth only exists outside the human realm of interpretation.

It is interesting how mixed and dynamic human movement is over the last centuries.

It is interesting that we haven’t given much thought to the potential diversity between Neanderthal and homo erectus groups. I mean if all animals are simply affectations of their environment in one sense, then surely the Neanderthals in northern Europe would have rather different to others in the Levant or central Asia.

I think if hybridisation is true then our understanding of that concept should broaden to include the possible diversity of mixing and the potential special awareness abilities and perceptions that would create. Imagine if their were three or most distant Neanderthal subgroups and even others such as Peking man and other erectus groups. That would explain the range and complexity of human Neuro diversity.

Oops! From today's genetics, it is unprovable. My view is if it worked, it spread and fast, so there is no pre contact line left, they are as gone as the Neanderthal.

The original discussion was are Moderns a line that developed alone, from Erectus, and never went back, a new species that has nothing to do with those dirty apes, or did they become another breed, and like Erectus, Neanderthal, perhaps others, and what survived are Mutts.

Knowing humans, I support the mutt view.

Current humans have been gene mapped, the work on Neanderthal is new and incomplete. As was pointed out in the link, only a partial pattern can be gotten from fossils at this point.

To form a baseline to compare, modern and Erectus bones of the same age should be compared with Neanderthal. I think the DNA is being extracted from teeth, good packing for long term storage.

We still lack the science to get a whole genome, but it would be comparing things that are the same.

Neanderthal is Erectus, that split off and went north. Modern is an Erectus that became a modern. All three existed at the same time, for 100,000 years.

The differance being sought is not Species, but Genetic Drift, one line split to three, each continued to develop, slowly, mostly involving very close relatives. This leads to genetic subtraction, genes are lost forever. This produces mutations, and most are bad.

Where Moderns are the latest mutation, only a few generations from Erectus, there is not much genetic drift. Neanderthal had split 250,000 years before, did the usual small group breeding, one pair of grandparents, one pair of great grandparents, going way back, a narrow family tree with no branches.

According to the Human Genome Project, most of Europe tracks back to one very closely related group, almost genetic twins, long line bred, and less than one hundred.

They should have died out. Neanderthal was the same, the land could not support a large breeding pool, and the whole group shared a very few ancestors who first came north. Suddenly there is a burst of technology, a larger bodied and brained Cro Magon, and that would be expected if two thin lines with a quarter of a million years of genetic drift crossed.

While the Mt DNA of the modern mothers would have continued, both of the parent lines ended. A very short time later when Erectus met the breeds, they too ended. It did not take war, only spreading the newly invigorated DNA caused by the cross. As this was most likely done by the males, the mt DNA of Africa survived, many mother lines, where Byron Sykes, in The Seven Faces of Eve, says seven mother lines make up almost all of Europe.

We can trace mother lines up through time, but have nothing on the male lines. It is so new I was around reading science when Watson and Crick made a double helix model of DNA. We are very slowing untwisting it.

The Human Genome Project was large and long, it is mapped, but we do not know if we are looking at it upsidedown, and the name of streets and towns are in a language we do not understand.

We first thought, four bases? We will build a machine that builds DNA, and raise dinosaurs for food. It did make a movie, where dinosaurs ate people, but the reality is grafting a very small part into a mouse, or pig.

Some of it is filler, duplicates, not turned on, and we have little idea what turns genes on, off, or bores them. Autism is genetic, in a half dozen places, that do not seem related. Is the thing on because of Autism, or is it a cause?

Downes was rather plain to see, but most things have very complex patterns, and we do not know what that means in the general population that has not been studied.

What we know is we are DNA, the same that started blue green algae some five billion years ago. We have been worms and fish, lots of stuff, and now we have fingers and computers. DNA is not a thing, it is a process of becoming. This is much worse than trying to out think your own brain.

We know it is very complex, that 99.9% DNA is called dead, and have no idea how it arose. Something like a steam fed mud pit in a swamp spitting out a perfect and fully fueled and working Boeing 747 that could replicate its self.

Problem two is it could not have existed before, for in the first ten billion years after the Big Bang, all the matter was forming in stars, the four bases did not yet exist, and it was too hot. After a lot of super nova, matter is spread out, forms molten balls, and as soon as it cools enough for life, there is DNA, as blue green algae.

I see Science as posing the questions we cannot answer, for almost all of our answers have been wrong. To get a working answer, one must pose a question that takes all into account.

DNA is hardware, even if wet. the other question is being studied at the Swiss Mind Brain Institute, where they have build a computer that models a rat brain. The nature of thought is electronic, and we know less about that.

Hard Science is slow, I like to play, so I write. All of my models are from a few facts in old books, and I try to bring them into one story that works. It is science fiction, as is most science. Is it us playing with our brains, our brains playing with us, DNA playing with both?

It all starts with a good question, some kid goes to school for twentyfive years seeking the answer, and comes up with a better question.

At the same time most of our hard won facts of science are disproven. Even Math and Physics are questioned. I have strong doubts that the speed of light is a constant.

None of us are good at answering questions, but we are great at coming up with them.

Human neurodiversity (unlike human culture) is not complex. All the neurodiversity-traits are related, and there is only one set of related neurodiversity-traits.

Here is what I responded to:

Social traits inherited from what species? Let me guess, Neanderthals? Note that in fact this claim references Autistic peoples’ communication behaviors while not actually directly making any reference to “NT communication” behaviors, nor any claims about which animals might "be able to talk NT.

Why am I unsurprised that you cannot even keep track of your own arguments?

Complete nonsense. My cat is not disabled due to not being able to communicate in a manner typical to human beings.


Calling things PC is such a tired cliché. You either have the goods in terms of substantive arguments, or you have a sack of cliches and rhetorical devices (like suggesting other people are just “screaming” because they are “PC”, when your real issue with them appears to be that they have annoyed you by presenting claims or facts that you are unable to respond to).

My worldview is not particularly human centric, and unlike you, I do not actually have an agenda in this matter, beyond learning about and knowing the truth for truth’s own sake.