I’m not sure the age of a “cellular structure” determines the level of primate immunity.
There isn’t a good consensus in the scientific community on that issue. There are even lots of anthropologists who believe that we didn’t acquire “fully articulate language” until about 70k years ago, even though our species is generally thought to have appeared almost 200k years ago.
I would hope that genetic information we obtain in the next decade or so will be what gets us closer to an answer to those questions.
The film Iceman may be relevant to many of the issues discussed here.
Apart from the inherent sexism of your equating Neanderthal-without-qualifier with “male Neanderthal,” how are we supposed to know what a male Neanderthal is going to consider attractive? And what if the female doesn’t think the male is attractive?
“Yes, our group is applying for a grant to recreate an alternative subspecies of humanity, who were very likely incapable of reproducing contemporary speech, and who were almost certainly several times stronger than modern humans. We’re interested in finding out whether they possessed reasoning ability and the potential for complex culture, or if they would simply tend to go berserk like terrified animals in a mad frenzy of raping and killing. Needless to say, we’ll need funding broad enough to cover either contingency. Our collective professional opinion is that nothing could possibly go wrong.”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a neanderthal.”
I’ll give you the answer Thursday Next.
I don’t think it was as much sexism as just the default significant other. Merely a habit of what is usually considered the ideal other gender. So, not sexism, just easier and more natural to say than “hot neanderthal of the preferred gender of the other neanderthal.”
Wait, the Neanderthal is a doctor and the mother
of the kid in the car wreck.
Are Neanderthals familiar with acid glue?
I liked Sliders. Started as a good show, but jumped the shark pretty early.
Also, as Hamlet pointed out, author Jasper Fforde covered this ethical dilemma in his Thursday Next series. As I recall, the cloned Neanderthals seemed to be out of place in the modern world, and the cloned Mammoths also caused some destruction in Great Britain during the migratory season.
I’ve a hard time buying this part of your cite. Neanderthals having a more limited speech ability because their brain was different? Maybe. But because they could only articulate a limited number of phonemes? No way. They would find a way around in quick order. A previous poster mentioned tones, but they could as well have used for instance whistles or gestures. Not only they could have, but they would have, if they were similar to us. Deaf people can easily learn a complex language like ASL that doesn’t use any sound at all. And not only can they learn it, but even if it’s not taught to them, they will make up their own sign language if a number of them live together.
A limited ability to articulate a variety of sounds might be an evidence of a lack of a complex language, but it can’t possibly be its cause.
I can’t believe you’re being so homophobic as to assume that the Neanderthal-without-qualifier is automatically heterosexual, and that DanBlather wasn’t thinking of a lesbian couple. 
Nitpick: it wouldn’t be resurrecting a Neanderthal, it would be creating a new Neanderthal with genes identical to a Neanderthal that once lived. Those aren’t the same thing.
You might not get as much anthropological data as you’d like. Problem is, things like culture and language are learned, and there would be nobody to teach those things to a cloned Neanderthal. You would learn something about what Neanderthals were capable of in terms of language and culture, but not what they actually did. Expecting a cloned Neanderthal to reproduce a Neanderthal language and culture (presumably there were several) exactly like one that existed in the past would be like cloning a person from the body of someone who lived during the Roman Empire and expecting them to speak Latin and practice Roman culture.
As far as communication is concerned, how well could a Neanderthal text-message or use a Blackberry?
I bet that with some very sophisticated electronics and software, the electronic speech thingies that survivors of laryngeal cancer patients use could be modified to enable a Neanderthal to enunciate a wider range of sounds.
There would be something learned, Anne, by the Neanderthal’s living physiology: what could she eat, how fast could she run, how good is her hearing, how long is her natural lifespan, etc. Although it would be difficult to draw broad conclusions from a single individual, it would certainly be a stronger data point than we have today.
Of course, then we put two Neanderthals in a gladiatorial cage match to see how well they battle to the death. Somebody cue the “Star Trek” fight music.
Well, like I said it was a just a source for “reasoned speculations” … Actually I thought Belowjob2.0’s point was very good the moment I read it. It is also true that the gene most thought to be associated with language capacity in humans, FOXP2, is present in Neanderthals. And there is great reason to believe that gestural language preceded spoken language in the hominid line. But it does suggest which extant language environments would be most apt to raise a Neanderthal* in. Probably exposed simultaneously to both a tonal language and to some version of sign. As to diet, we know they were big meat eaters - and required many calories. And we know they were more cold than warm weather adapted.
The question of why they lost out to the upstart Homo Sapiens is still an interesting one. Was their intelligence just a less flexible/creative sort (certainly we all have experienced that the creative types often have different sorts of intelligence than those highly skilled in detailed analysis) or was evolution acting at the level of the group - Homo Sapiens was first to create a larger cultural organization, a meta-organism of sorts, that allowed individuals with the same or lesser cognitive capacity to benefit more from a wide variety of individual inputs - and Neandertals didn’t organize in response fast enough?
Or is it Neandert*al? I read it both ways with Science usually dropping the h. Such as in this article.
Taxonomy is conservative, and the spelling shouldn’t change just because the modern language changed. It’s Homo neanderthalensis, so I favor Neanderthal. Also, “Neanderthal” has become an English word, even if it’s root is in German. English doesn’t have regular spelling reforms. But that’s just MHO.
Sure, you’ll get some of that. But you shouldn’t expect to get information about Neanderthal language and culture, since those things were learned.
You won’t even reliably get information on what sounds Neanderthals couldn’t make after the new Neanderthal grows up, since they might go through something similar to what modern humans do. We’re born able to make and distinguish sounds that don’t occur in our native language, but we lose that ability sometime in childhood. The cloned Neanderthal is going to be raised by someone who speaks some language, and might pick up at least some of that language, so the same thing might happen to her.