“…
some human populations such as Australian aboriginals indeed share with archaic
humans like Neanderthals a robust skull with pronounced brow ridges, which [led]
Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Huxley (in Lyell 1863), to compare
them
with Neanderthals”.
Günter Bechly
This
comes as no surprise whatsoever to me (Damien Mackey).
See
e.g. my articles:
Neanderthals
need to be re-written
(5) Neanderthals
need to be rewritten
Messing
with the Neanderthals
(5) Messing with
the Neanderthals
Neanderthals
could speak
See also Dr. Jack Cuozzo’s
book (Buried Alive).
We read at:
New Evidence for Human
Nature of Neanderthals | Science and Culture Today
Fossil Friday: New
Evidence for the Human Nature of Neanderthals
February 2, 2024
The reconstruction of Neanderthal appearance and
behavior has quite a checkered history. After an initial controversy over
whether the fossils really represent ancient humans or just malformed modern
humans, Neanderthals were described in 1864 as distinct hominin species, Homo
neanderthalensis. For a long time they were considered as brutish cavemen
with a club and almost gorilla-like appearance.
Then the scientific opinion shifted and Neanderthals
were more and more recognized as human-like and even as geniuses of the ice age
(Husemann 2005, Finlayson 2019),
based on an avalanche of new evidence for complex human behavior (Nowell 2023, Vernimmen
2023). We now know that Neanderthals used fire (Angelucci et al. 2023),
buried their dead (Balzeau
et al. 2020, Dockdrill
2020), created stone circles (Jaubert
et al. 2016, Callaway 2016)
and bone tools (Soressi et
al. 2013), made jewellery from eagle talons (Radovčić et al. 2015, Rodríguez-Hidalgo
et al. 2019) and used feathers as
body decoration (Peresani et
al. 2011, Finlayson et al. 2012), made cave art with paintings and engravings (Rodríguez-Vidal
et al. 2014, Hoffmann
et al. 2018a, Marquet et al. 2023), played
music with bone flutes (Turk et al. 2018), used ochre
as pigment (Roebroeks et al.
2012, Hoffmann et al. 2018b) and sophisticated fibre technology (Hardy
et al. 2020), produced flour from
processed plants (Mariotti Lippi et al. 2023),
dived for seafood (Villa et al. 2020), cooked
food and self-medicated with herbal painkillers and antibiotics (Hardy
et al. 2012, Weyrich
et al. 2017), and even produced glue
from birch bark with a complex chemical procedure (Blessing & Schmidt 2021, Schmidt
et al. 2023).
New Anatomic Data
But it is not just new evidence for Neanderthal
behavior that overturned our previous crude image of Neanderthals as dumb
brutes, but also new anatomic data. Contrary to earlier beliefs, more recent
studies have demonstrated a fully upright posture with typical human spinal
curvature called lordosis (Haeusler
et al. 2019). The latter authors
concluded that “after more than a century of alternative views, it should be
apparent that there is nothing in Neandertal pelvic or vertebral morphology
that rejects their possession of spinal curvatures well within the ranges of
variation of healthy recent humans.”
There even exists compelling new evidence for hearing
and speech capacities (Conde-Valverde
et al. 2021), which “demonstrates
that the Neanderthals possessed a communication system that was as complex and
efficient as modern human speech” (Starr 2021).
Correlated with this fundamental rethinking of
Neanderthals (Nowell 2023)
in terms of their anatomy, culture, and mental capabilities, their
classification has also changed over time. At first they were considered as a
different species, Homo neanderthalensis, then they were just
considered as a subspecies of modern humans, Homo sapiens, and
since the late 1990s again as “an unambiguously demarcated morphospecies” (Tattersall & Schwartz 2006; also see Harvati
et al. 2004, Márquez
et al. 2014, and Wynn
et al. 2016). The new field of
paleogenomics brought insight into their DNA (Green
et al. 2010), which was considered as
sufficiently dissimilar to warrant a separate species status again (Clarke
2016), even though there was also
evidence for hybridization and genetic admixture with modern humans (Meneganzin &
Bernardi 2023). Paleogeneticist and Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo
(2014) called the controversy of the species status of Neanderthals as
unresolvable, because of the arbitrariness and fuzziness of species concepts
(also see Meneganzin
& Bernardi 2023, Nowell 2023,
and Stringer 2023).
The controversy still continues as is evident from a recent article titled “Are
Neanderthals and Homo sapiens the same species?” (Heidt 2023),
which discusses the fact that “scientists have been vollying the question back
and forth for more than a century”. Nowell (2023) wrote:
“From their initial discovery until today, Neandertals have shifted between
“being recognized as human or being pushed to the constitutive outside of
humanness,” what Drell (2000, p. 15) describes as “the oscillating dichotomy of
Same and Other.”
Of course, the undeniable evidence for significant and
common genetic admixture (Kuhlwilm
et al. 2016, Villanea & Schraiber 2019, Callaway
2021), which makes up 1-4 percent of
the modern human genome (Reilly
et al. 2022), would suggest that
Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common gene pool and belonged to the
same biospecies. Even the skeptic and ID opponent Michael Shermer (2010) agreed
in an article for Scientific American that the genomic
evidence suggests that our Neanderthal brethren were not a separate
species. Strong reproductive isolation barriers that limited the amount of
introgression were proposed by Overmann
& Coolidge (2013), but many
experts remain unconvinced. Paleoanthropologist Bence Viola from the
University of Toronto said (quoted in Vernimmen
2023): “Homo sapiens clearly recognized Neanderthals as mating
partners, which suggests they thought of them as humans — maybe ‘the weird guys
living behind the mountains,’ but still, fellow humans.”
But what do we make of the anatomical differences
between Neanderthals and modern humans? Don’t they support a separate species
status? Actually, this would not follow even if the differences lay outside the
range of variability of modern humans, because that is also the case in many
other subspecies of living animals. However, some human populations such as
Australian aboriginals indeed share with archaic humans like Neanderthals a
robust skull with pronounced brow ridges, which [led] Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas
Huxley (in Lyell 1863), to compare them with Neanderthals.
Of course this also had some typical Darwinist racist
connotations. Just like Neanderthals, native Australians were considered
primitive and inferior. Nevertheless, the similarities are real and have been
confirmed by modern anatomical studies (e.g., Wolpoff & Caspari 1996),
which concluded that “the interpretation of Neanderthals as a different species
is very unlikely.” ….
