Last-stand Neanderthals queried

[dipsydoodle]

We may need to look again at the idea that a late Neanderthal population existed in southern Spain as recently as 35,000 years ago, a study suggests.

Scientists using a "more reliable" form of radiocarbon dating have re-assessed fossils from the region and found them to be far older than anyone thought.

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Its results have implications for when and where we - modern humans - might have co-existed with our evolutionary "cousins", the Neanderthals.

"The picture emerging is of an overlapping period [in Europe] that could be of the order of perhaps 3,000-4,000 years - a period over which we have a mosaic of modern humans being present and then Neanderthals slowly ebbing away, and finally becoming extinct," explained co-author Prof Thomas Higham from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford, UK.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21330194

[lastlib]

1. If Neanderthals are extinct, then how do we explain Republicans?

It's obvious that at least a few survived, or somehow failed to make the evolutionary jump.

[libodem]

2. You may be on to something big

Happy Homo Habilis.

[Warpy]

4. Neanderthals cared for their sick and honored their dead

so it would seem that Republicanism came from another source.

Forensic reconstructions of Neanderthals have yielded people we wouldn't look twice at on any subway, just a little odd but certainly not as odd as the old National Geographic pictures in the 50s made them.

They were at least as human as we are and some anthropologists have held them up as the best of what we are.

[lastlib]

5. Well, I know that pond-scum-waste is in the lineage somewhere......

...but I thought there might be another "transition species" in the line.....

[Warpy]

6. Undoubtedly. In fact, humans and chimps

mated, diverged, mated again, diverged again. I'd have to look up the last divergence date, but it wasn't that incredibly long ago, considering homo habilis had been on the plains of Africa, making and using tools 3.5 million years ago (or more, that's just the earliest fossilized bone we've found). Maybe our Republican brethren just ended up with more chimp DNA.

There were likely dozens of hominid species, as yet undiscovered, who contributed DNA to us. Either climate change or interbreeding removed them as distinct species, leaving all the great apes around today a crazy salad of species.

We might also be the rough draft for intelligence on this planet, which existed for billions of years before we appeared and will continue billions of years after we're gone and forgotten.

[pauldemmd195j]

7. That's a very good question, indeed

Republicans do exhibit rather primitive and parochial ways of thought, suggesting a smaller brain. More research should be done in this field, so that we could better understand why Republicans behave as they do.

[WheelWalker]

3. Pockets of dead-enders