I was watching a documentry on the different findings of
bones that archeologists have dug up especially in africa,
and a question came to my mind
Are Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Australopithicus, and Homo Habilis the same bloodline, like was my great X 10000 grandparents a neanderthal or australopithicus?
Then how excatly do these species separate? When does a
son become a different species then mother? or grandmother, ect.
o, and one other question related to this topic;
My 7th text book once said that Neanderthal was only capable
to focus on one task- that is, when sharpening a knife, Neanderthal
can only concentrate on sharpening that knife rather then
sharpening and thinking about how to repair his fence with it
when hes done.
forgot to put the last question in there:
how do scientists know just by looking at the size of the cranium or other things taht neanderthal can only concentrate on one task at a time?
I am not an expert, but I believe that the current theory is that Homo Neanderthalis and Homo Sapiens are two species of the genus Homo that coexisted at some time in the past. This means that none of your ancestors (or mine, for that matter) were Neanderthals. The two species share common ancestors further back.
Species don’t separate in the space of one generation, it happens over many generations, usually in populations of the same species that become isolated geographically and evolve in different directions. At some point, they are genetically so different that they cannot interbreed and are considered different species.
Someone may come along any minute to correct me on this, but that is my general understanding.
All the above are certainly descended from a common ancestor…
Cro-Magnon people were anatomically modern humans just like ourselves, not a different species at all; Homo Neanderthalis was a recent human species which lasted until the last couple of tens of thousands of years, and was much much more like modern humans than either neanderthals or ourselves are like H. Habilis or the Australopithicines (which weren’t just one species but a whole genus).
The hominid (human ancestor or close relative) family tree is quite messy and in its details very controversial, but one thing that has become very clear over the past few decades is that there were many different branches of the tree, not just one straight trunk with us at the end of it.
This may well be true. Then again, it may not be true. Sadly, there aren’t any Neanderthals around to ask… what we do know is that their brains were of comparable size to our own, but their tools and other material culture do not seem to have been as advanced as early Homo Sapiens’s…
Then again, I have mornings when even getting out of bed seems waaay too hard, let alone producing tools from rocks, so maybe the Neanderthals were superior after all…
They don’t, and that sounds more like one individual’s speculation than a consensus of the anthropological community.
What they can do is examine the shape of the skull, make the assumption that the brains of Neandertal operated in the same ways as the brains of Sapiens, and then speculate that if the region of our brain where we handle multi-tasking would, on a Neandertal, have been much smaller (because of the skull shape), then perhaps the Neandertal would have more difficulty handling simultaneous tasks.
Jean Auel, in her book Clan of the Cave Bear used that sort of speculation. Noting that the region of the brain where we store memories is bounded by a region of the skull that is much larger in Neandertals, she depicted the Neandertals as having enormous memories (actually, she gave them racial memories going back to the beginnings of their development, although she never explained how that was supposed to happen). Similarly, she took two factoids, a shape of the mouth and a smaller section of skull in Neandertal where we process spoken language, and made her Neandertals nearly inarticulate, relying on signing rather than speech for communication.
I am not sure where she got her ideas, but they remain speculative, in any event. Even if the Neandertals had a section of the skull/brain that differed significantly from ours, there is no current way to know that they did not simply use a different section of the brain for similar functions.
BTW, I believe that Neandertals have been granted human status by the anthropologists and that we are now known as Homo Sapiens sapiens while they are known as Homo Sapiens Neandertalensis. (Someone will be by to correct me in a bit.)
I think this is still pretty debatable. One problem agreeing on what exactly a subspecies is. The classic way to decide if two creatures are different species is to breed 'em and then see if the offspring is viable. As far as I know, there’s nothing as concrete as this for defining subspecies. Recent developments in genetics are providing promising methods of determining these sort of relationships, though.
The problem then becomes finding Neanderthal DNA that’s in good enough condition to be analysed - only a few samples have ever been found. Genetic research on the question of our relatedness to Neanderthals is very recent indeed (you won’t find many specific cites going back more than two or three years). I had to write a paper on this for Uni last semester, and from what I could find, initial results are inconclusive, leaning towards negative, as far as Neanderthals being a sub-species of Homo sapiens is concerned.