I think this is pretty interesting, not least because I remember one of the first threads I ever read on this board was one where a few posters argued passionately that not only was there no evidence that this was the case, but stated categorically that it was probably impossible for the two species to interbreed at all. Now it appears that we did interbreed as species after all.
I wonder what this implies for the mystery or how neanderthals died out. Did we simply assimilate them?
Well, I 'm glad that’s been settled. I always liked that hypothesis best.
They walk among us, folks.
My guess is that no matter what they did, they were screwed.
Hey - I’ve dated at least a half a dozen of them…
You’ve dated my in-laws most likely.
[Europe 30,000 years ago]
[Cro-Magnon queen and her minions enters a Neanderthal cave]
Queen: We are the Cro-Mags. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Lower your clubs and prepare to be assimilated.
Neanderthals: Brugha! Membuntigo! Ngrrimingnta!
Queen: Brave words. I’ve heard them before, from thousands of tribes across thousands of caves, since long before you were created. But, now they are all Cro-Mag.
N: Abukiragga!
[The Neanderthals launch an attack, armed with their crude clubs; they are easily beaten back by the sharp spears and shields of the Cro-Mag soldiers]
Q: Small words from a small being, trying to attack what it doesn’t understand. We are on a quest to better ourselves, evolving toward a state of perfection.
[To her minions] Take their women!
snerk
I was watching Neanderthal Code on NatGeo a while back, where they were discussing the sequencing of the Neanderthal DNA. One of the things they learned from it was that, as quoted by Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party, Neanderthal’s possessed the language gene. The speculation was that Cro Magnon got that gene *from *Neanderthals, because the gene is identical for both, and that Neanderthals developed the gene because their hunting style (close in) required good communication between hunting party members.
That can be ruled out. Based on analysis of the genes, the interbreeding took place in the Middle East when early modern humans first left Africa, rather than 30,000 years ago in Europe when the Neanderthals finally disappeared.
That can also be ruled out, since language is obviously present in African populations of modern humans that never interbred with Neanderthals.
What’s really interesting is that they may have played the flute. New material for Gary Larson!
Either the ‘language gene’ evolved in a common ancestor before Neanderthals left Africa, or Neanderthals and modern humans both evolved the ‘language gene.’
Assuming there really is a ‘language gene,’ and the language difference between humans and other animals is qualitative, not quantitative.
Heh. I was starting to quote text from the show, with the caveat that the research had been performed a few years back and new information may have come out.
So I went looking, and it has. The “language gene” is FoxP2 (this was mentioned in the Neanderthal Code), and it apparently developed a long, LONG time ago.
So, cool! I’ve learned something new, and it’s really neat stuff, too.
Language gene? Are they talking about FOXP2? If so, it’s not unique to humans. It’s also conserved in animals such as fish and reptiles. I have a hard time accepting its presence as proof of language, since it’s a gene (or a protein, I should say) with a wide variety of physiological and developmental roles, even in non-vocalizing animals.
GAH! I hate it when they say something like this. While animals with FOXP2 knocked out have decreased vocalizations, they are also developmentally stunted, so it’s unclear exactly how much the FOXP2 protein has to do with speech SPECIFICALLY, rather than general cognitive development.
Allow me to ask what is possibly a very stupid question: What are the odds of a human couple producing a throwback?
Heh, I’d love to hear what Thomas Jefferson and his “Black people aren’t fully human” friends would say about this.
Actually most of my ancestors took off on a spacecraft they built. They left a lot of broken rocks, pointy sticks lying around as a joke, and one wag took pieces of a skull from a chimp and and a cro to confuse them about our physiology. The ones that stayed behind got all ready to greet the new super intelligent species from the south, but much to their surprise, they turned out to be a bunch of skinny apes who spent all their time wrapping animal skins around their bodies and tying knots in their hair. So my ancestors fucked all their women, and moved inland where it was less noisy. A bunch of them felt like they had some responsibility for the children they had abandoned, so they would surreptiously join the cros and show them how to do things. Always in some accidental way to avoid detection. Like one guy, I think related on my mother’s side, he pretended to drink too much of the bubbly berry juice and walked across a field dragging his spear behind him and letting seeds he gathered fall out of a gourd he was pretending to play like a trumpet. The cros were all laughing their asses off, so he pretended to be embarassed and went back stomping down the dirt on the furrow the spear dug in the ground like he was trying to cover up his mistake. Weeks later he had to go back and keep pointing out the neat row of plants that sprang up, scratching his head and saying “I wonder how that happened”. Eventually a cro figured it out. The idea caught on like wildfire, but it took a thousand years before they stopped believing they had get drunk before planting.
Yeah, I was thinking about how funny it is that Africans are the non-miscengenated ones while us Aryan uber-folk are the mongrels who mixed with “lesser” species.
Neanderthals weren’t a lesser or different species. All bloodlines of modern humans, going back to before the initial branching-out of the Neanderthal line, constitute one species. New evidence of long-suspected interbreeding only confirms this.