Complaints and debates about the handling of the fossil child proposed to be the offspring of Neanderthals and Hss have been heated and sometimes quite rude.
What do you think? Is this whole fossil issue a waste of time and space or important to the MultiRegional Evolution theory or a potential “thorn in the side” of the OOA people?
I think this fossil is a nationalist ploy and exactly the opposite of whatever mipsman says
Eh, Jois, is that maybe the wrong link? I read it twice but didn’t see anything in there about Neanderthal fossils–it’s all about rock art and petroglyphs. Or did I miss something?
I think she means to show that Joao Zilhao jumps to conclusions. Of course, the way that the possible (editorial comment - probable) 24,000 year old Hss-Neanderthal hybrid was found is suspicious enough. The archaeologist (I am not making this up) reached in and pulled the skeleton’s left forearm out of a rabbit hole.
Jois, it was a petty, ad feminam jab, one for which I might, several decades from now, feel a slight twinge of remorse.
Instead of falling back on a Galileo-was-also-persecuted defense, I was hoping to use the bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee, as evidence but it fell through.
I think it was in one of David Attenborough’s books that he stated the theory that a group of ancestral chimpanzees must have been isolated from the chimp range during a long severe dry period in central Africa. (I can’t find the source or I’d give dates.) This group became the bonobos, distinct physiologically and behaviorally from the standard chimpanzee. Unfortunately for my case, the bonobos are classified as a distinct species.
I believe in one of yours posts that a source was cited that quantified the variability of chimpanze DNA as greater than human DNA variability. I wonder if bonobo DNA variability is as low as human’s. You would expect that if both species were the descendants of small, geologically recently isolated groups of originally much older, larger and more variable groups.
Of course, if I find that regular chimpanzees and bonobos produce fertile offspring, this humility and quasi-accomodation to your ideas will immediately be suspended.
Several decades sounds okay to me, I’ll probably be around then.
Mipsman wrote: “I believe in one of your posts that a source was cited that quantified the variability of chimpanze DNA as greater than human DNA variability. I wonder if bonobo DNA variability is as low as human’s.”
No species in the mtDNA studies came close to our own remarkable lack of diversity. Bonobos included.
Mipsman wrote: “You would expect that if both species were the descendants of small, geologically recently isolated groups of originally much older, larger and more variable groups.”
I think that’s right but the older groups are also more variable because they have picked up mutations (variations) over the thousands or hundreds of thousands of years they were species before we were.
Hate to think of you going quasi since you are practically the last of the MRE people I’ve found. Chimps and bonobos don’t even wave when they see each other on the street.
