Ummmm the NFL during the off-season?
Today I saw a bit in the newspaper that normal human DNA is a lot more different between individuals than they thought.
He looks just like a guy I used to work for - seriously.
I’m guessing that this is one of the bad ones, yes?
Yeah. Neanderthal women wore fur-lined bras. 
They might, especially if they were using The GEICO website. 
Hey, that’s Stephanie from Survivor: Palau, isn’t it? I thought she looked awfully familiar.
My thinking is exactly opposite. I think recent reconstructions go out of their way to give the appearance of “sameness” – by giving the Neanderthals the same skin tone and hair patterns as modern Europeans. That seems to be the fad these days.
There is no reason to believe that is accurate. For all we know, they were as hairy as Persian cats, and could no more be mistaken for a modern human than a mastadon could be mistaken for an African elephant.
Here’s an older image of Neanderthal man from 1965, before the current trend to “modernize” Neanderthals. I can’t see this guy walking down the street without drawing stares.
And here’s another possible look at Neanderthal man, which would in no way pass for a modern human.
You call it a “current trend to modernize”, I call it, “improved forensics and reconstruction science.” What used to be 90% “art” and 10% “science” is now t’other way 'round. (Yes, I made those numbers up.)
Also, our British chap up above was shorn and shaved in that shot only so the skull and musculature was visible… If you watch the linked intro, it shows him all wildly hairy and he definitely looks more “other”. Or at least more Grizzly Adams.
I don’t think we have reason to think they’d be Persian cat hairy, simply because no other great ape is. We all have at least bare faces.
Good points, although let’s specify that Neandertals presumably did not have pelts like bears or gorillas, but rather (if hirsute) looked like the guy at the beach who resembles the victim of a fraternity prank involving toupees. (You’ve all seen him or his counterpart – if he shaved his back, chest, and legs, you could stuff a throw pillow with the trimmings.
Also your pachyderm analogy is better than you think. The mastodons had low, sloping foreheads (though apparently as intelligent as other elephantoids); the mammoths as a rule had high domed skulls with pronounced foreheads, much like the African elephant. And it’s believed (I’m not sure on what evidence) that the more southerly-range species of mammoth, the Columbian, Imperial, etc., were not shaggy like the woolly and the mastodon, but had the same sort of thick skin sparsely haired that typical modern elephants have.
Well, no. At least not as concerns skin tone and hairiness. “Better forensics” can’t tell us anything about those because skin and hair do not normally fossilize.
So I stand by my “current trend” comment. Current trends are to make Neanderthals look more modern, but there is nothing in the fossil record to support that.
Perhaps DNA analysis will one day help us answer some of these questions, but for the moment its just guesswork.
Why should we assume that? We’re closely related to chimps, and look how hairy they are. Why should we assume neanderthals would be less so? (Particularly given their north-trending climate range.)
In fact, if Neanderthals looked radically different from modern humans (for example much hairier), it would help explain the newest DNA evidence suggesting that there was no interbreeding going on between the two groups. Who would want to mate with an upright gorilla?
As I mentioned in the GD thread, that cannot be based on a Neanderthal skull. The cranium is about right, but the face is completely wrong. We know how to reconstruct noses based on the nasal cavity and the angle of the bone just above it, and Neanderthals didn’t have flat nose like that. Their mouths did not project out that far, either. I don’t know where that came from, but it looks like a deliberate attempt to make Neanderthals look ape-like.
We’re fairly certain they wore hides to protect against the cold, and they had fire as well. The more likely scenario is that were not hairy like a chimp, even if they might have had more hair than we do.
I was also wondering about the apparent assumption that all neanderthals were white. Any credence to that?
It’s perfectly reasonable to give Neanderthal reconstructions sapiens-like hair and other superficial features. Given that our reconstruction techniques can’t actually determine those features presently, our best guess is to make them resemble their closest known relatives. Who, fortunately, we do have living specimens of. Yes, they’re reasonably closely related to chimps and gorillas, but then, so are we. And we’re significantly closer to each other than either of us is to the modern hairy apes.
If you’re referring to it’s color, it’s not white. If you’re referring to its ethnicity, you’re anthropomorphizing.
No, other than the thought that similar selective pressures would produce similar physical results. Also, Neanderthals and proto-Neanderthals lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, unlike us who have lived there only about 1/10 as long. They most likely were much better adapted, physically, to that type of climate than we are.
And, to complete that thought, those adaptations include things like light colored skin to let the sunshine in to make Vitamin D, protruding noses to warm the colder northern air and light colored eyes in areas with less light…or, to “anthropomorphize”, roughly Caucasian features.
In many artistic depicitions and reconstructions, the skin is quite obviously closer to a caucasian tone, and the soft tissue facial features look more caucasian than not. I have never seen any depiction of a caveman with curly African-type hair or Asian-style epicanthic eyelids. I don’t think I’m the one who is anthropomorphizing.