[QUOTE=Brain Wreck]
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.
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The people who reconstructed the neanderthal may have anthropomorphized it. We can discuss that. But saying the reconstruction is white as opposed to say, light skinned, is clearly anthropomorphizing. Gorillas have black faces, but saying gorillas are black in a human ethnic sense is anthropomorphizing.
[QUOTE=Brain Wreck]
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.
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Generally speaking, you only see “caucasion” features in Neanderthals, not other “cavemen”. Usually, the early Sapiens and the Southern Erectus populations are depicted with what would look like African features today. I’m speaking about depictions from the last 20-30 years, though-- not some you might have seen from 50 or more years ago. I would pretty much discount those altogether. Check out this rendition of H. rudolfensis for example.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
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…
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…thick fur to protect against the cold…
Oh…wait…
[QUOTE=John Mace]
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.
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I’ll grant you that the nose is probably wrong, but a bigger nose wouldn’t make that face human. As for the mouth, here’s a Neanderthal skull that seems to have just such a projecting mouth. Here’s another.
My main point is that we have no idea about hairiness or coloration. For all we know, Neanderthals could have had thick orange fur and stripes like a tiger.
Speaking of which, and by way of illustrating my point: here’s a tiger skeleton and here’s a lion skeleton. Would we be able to depict these animals accurately if we knew them only by their skeletons? Would we know that lions have big freaking manes? Or that tigers had stripes? Would we even know we were looking at two different species?
Human skeletons and Neanderthal skeletons are much more divergent than those of the lion and the tiger. Who knows how vastly different their coloration and hair patterns may have been?
Cite? How do we know that?
Why is that more likely? We have no idea at what point the hairlessness of modern humans evolved. It could have been after humans and Neanderthals diverged.
And as I have pointed out repeatedly, thick fur would be a great adaptation for the cold climates in which Neanderthals thrived. Neanderthals were exposed to the evolutionary pressures of cold climates much longer than have been modern humans.
Oh, and here’s the source for that far-from-human reconstruction of a Neanderthal face.
[QUOTE=spoke-]
Oh, and here’s the source for that far-from-human reconstruction of a Neanderthal face.
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The mouth in the reconstrution juts out much further than the skull indicates it would.
And I addressed the points in your other post in the GD thread.