What does this mean?
It means, once we have reached a stage of physiological evolutionary development, via things like natural selection and survival of the fittest, there is only so far we can be refined, or specialized. The difference in survival chances between Neanderthals and those who went on to become homo sapiens, would have been more dictated by mental development, than physiological development, from my admittedly limited viewpoint. Am I making any sense? 
You sound as if you believe that Homo sapiens is some sort of obvious evolutionary endpoint. There are plenty of physiological differences between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens…they weren’t just dumber humans. It’s entirely possible they weren’t all that much less intelligent at all.
I’m reading from the post I quoted that you seem to think the neanderthals “went on to become Homo sapiens”. The neanderthals were not our ancestors. They were a separate branch of the hominid tree, one which we are not in direct descent from.
Anyway, I think the question was asked because you sound as if you think that there was a “goal” that evolution was working toward (Homo sapiens) and that since there are now Homo sapiens walking around, evolution for us is over. While natural selection now only works on the most severe examples of non-fitness, evolution is still working. There will undoubtedly be some other selection process that dictates our future evolution (sexual selection, perhaps, or some other criterion), assuming that our current civilization with its inherent protection for what would have been considered fatal weakness in an earlier time lasts for very much longer.
Jayjay, here’s what I said
I am saying the same as you, that our ancestors weren’t Neanderthals. So, no argument there.
You then say,
Regarding the bolded bit, I’d be interested if you or any other Doper’s can elaborate on what evolutionary prospects homo sapien may have ahead of them, that would have arisen via nature, and not in a DNA lab, or via technological adavances.
As for the underlined bit, I could make no real sense to me, so would you like to do the honours this time?
There’s a real sentence mixed in there somewhere!
Jayjay, we’re here, they’re not; what am I supposed to believe? We evolved, they didn’t. Unless anyone is going to correct me?
As far as the bolded part, evolution is always working. You can’t stop it except by going extinct. Mutation happens. Mutation will always happen. It’s the nature of life to change. What isn’t happening anymore, except for extreme cases, is natural selection…death prior to reproduction. The majority of children born without very extreme birth defects are much more likely to live to reproductive age than they were even 100 years ago, let alone 10,000. Poor eyesight, deafness, and mobility problems no longer mean that you’re food for wolves. Clumsiness, mental retardation, autism and general mental illness no longer mean that you die in accidents or get exposed to the elements soon after birth like it used to. So natural selection in most cases is no longer operative.
But there are other selection criteria. Sexual selection, based on what physical or mental characteristics a woman is looking for in a man, or vice versa, for example. If the bulk of women at a particular time in history are looking for men with wide shoulders and slim waists, then for a while there will be a trend toward the population acquiring wide shoulders and slim waists. That’s overly simplified, but you get the gist of it.
As for the underlined part, what I’m saying is that civilization is a blip in time. It’s a veneer on a very long evolutionary core. The branch of hominids on the tree of life is several million years old. Civilization has been around for, at most, 10,000 years. Probably quite a bit less than that. There’s no guarantee that civilization as we know it will be around for another 1000 years, let alone another 10,000. There’s nothing inevitable about modern civilization, and our modern protections for the “defects” I noted above will go with it when it goes.
Huh? Social conditioning is just that - the generally accepted modes of behaviour of a particular group, which can be totally inverted in a generation or less.
Every modern human is essentially identical from a hardware or genetic perspective. Meaning that biologically you and I are exactly the same as those few tribesmen making a living as hunters in the forests of papua new guinea, amazonia and so on, and we are all pretty much identical to the humans of 10,000 years ago. There is no such thing as ‘homo domesticus’ or ‘homo pacifiencis’.
I wrote that thinking you believed we were direct descendants of them. And frankly, we haven’t changed that much since the time our species co-existed. There hasn’t really been enough time for any major changes when our generational turnaround time is roughly 20-25 years.
We evolved, they went extinct. Probably because we killed them all, or at least outcompeted them in shared environments.
Frankly, I don’t really understand the point of the quoted question…it’s not that they didn’t evolve. It’s that we probably pushed them out, crowded them out. Competition isn’t evolution, as such. It’s a component, a part of natural selection. It’s possible that they went extinct not because they were less intelligent, but because they were less agressive. We really don’t know all that much about neanderthal culture…it may just be that they were of a temperament that caused them to move on when they were crowded by humans…eventually, they had nowhere else to go. I’m no paleoanthropologist. I don’t know.
I’m that fuckwad, thank you, who clubbed a “bunny” (actually it was a nasty large Jack rabbit) with a 9 iron.
I did it to preserve my landscaping and garden, and yes, I did enjoy it. 
Its very hard to get shit to grow where I live, and I take exception when something trys to kill it.
The dog that got into the chicken pen and wiped out a mess of birds got beaten with a 2 x 4.
The coyote that decimated the turkey population got the shot at (missed! Dammit!) with a .22.
I ride motorcycles for “sport” and enjoyment. I kill vermin to protect my investments.
You’re not a fuckwad for doing it, you are one for enjoying it, Gato.
Personal insults are not allowed in this forum, ivan astikov. You got away with this one once and were told it deserved a warning, so repeating the insult is pretty dumb.
Marley23, I am not just trying to push members buttons, and I promise I’ll keep my insults in The Pit, from now on.
I thought I’d better check, and spotted this…
Does that apply in The Pit as well?
Hate speech and trolling are not allowed in the Pit, nor is wishing death on other posters. Personal insults are allowed and civility is, um, not required.
Is this legal? Because I would so be there.
“Hey man, I’m hunting the baby lambs for food! Now get out of my way, you’re spoiling my shot of the mint bushes.” BLAM!
Can I ask the hunters on the board, being that they are so traditionally minded, what they feel about the “sport” of bullfighting?
Here we have a traditional past-time, whereby it is quite normal that children are encouraged to chase baby bulls around, and stab them with knives and spears. Is this really just harmless venting of our ‘hunting instincts’?
I dunno. I went to a lot of effort to post a pretty long and thoughtful explanation that I thought might foster some understanding… and you completely ignored it.
I hope I’m mistaken, but I’m beginning to doubt that you’re here for the actual intellectual exchange.
You’re not seriously comparing a quick kill with (hopefully) a single bullet or arrow to ritualized torture and slow death, are you? Especially when hunting’s about food and bullfighting is about entertainment?
All of what I know about Bull-fighting comes from Hemmingway’s Death in the Afternoon. Like most things, bullfighting may be a bit more complex than is at first apparent.
Bullfighting was at least partially about food, since the poor folk got to eat the bulls, or at least they used to.
Really, what bullfighting is about, is hating women. The matador is in the tight outfit with the funny hat, because he is supposed to represent a woman. The bull represents the man. The bull gets poked with sharp sticks, and driven into a frenzied frustration it chases after the matador who continually tortures it before delivering the coup de grace.
Clearly, the guy that invented bullfighting was married.