To Be Or Not To Be Neanderthal, That Is The Question

If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.

news.discovery.com...

It was recently confirmed. Modern man (Cro Magnon, precursor of Homo Sapiens) interbred with Homo Neanderthalensis.

The results show that 2% to 5% of our DNA stems from Neanderthals. This was discovered when the Neanderthal genome was finally sequenced in 2010.

This in itself is a fairly spectacular discovery, but there's another twist to it. Only the Cro Magnons that moved into Europe (and the Near East) interbred with the Neanderthals (who's habitat was basically Europe, and in theory never spread further than the Middle East). These populations then spread over the Eurasian continent, then furthered themselves to the remaining continents. This migration route never led below Sub-saharan Africa though, because here, the Neanderthal DNA is absent in the current populations.

In short, Europeans (Caucasians) and Asians carry the Neanderthal DNA, but sub-Saharan (black) Africans don't. It depends a little on how we consider human species and evolution, but you could say that sub-Saharan Africans are purely Homo Sapiens, while Europeans and Asians are a hybrid mix between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. At 2% to 5%, the Neanderthal influence could be considered marginal, but it still has implications on how we consider race, since humanity no longer can be said to be genetically homogenous.

Now, before moralists rush in to criticize, let me point out that there are no whatsoever racist ideas behind it. Racism by definition is an ideology about racial ideals, and how a certain race or races can be considered superior to other races, and or should be segregated from them. While I do consider that we are all equal as human beings, I do however believe that we are different genetically, and that we do not need to suppress the recognition of that difference in order to establish that we're equal. After all, men and women can be different, and even cherish those differences, and still (should) be equal as human beings, no?

What I'm after is something different; the true nature of Neanderthal man. For long he has been portrayed as a kind of primitive, inferior lineage in the evolution of mankind, that died out because of his 'incapacity' to adapt to new conditions (isn't that in itself a racist attitude?). The main basis for these assumptions is that he started to disappear as Homo Sapiens entered his territory, and disappeared all together after about 10 000 years of co-habitation.

My question is, can we learn more about Neanderthals by studying physical, mental and cultural attributes of Caucasian and Asian populations, and compare them to equivalent attributes of sub-Saharan Africans?

2% to 5% of Neanderthal influence may not sound like much, but consider this. We know through research on the Neanderthal genome, that Neanderthals had white skin and brown/blond/reddish hair (at least much of the European Neanderthal populations did). Is it pure coincidence that we find white skinned, brown/blond/red haired Homo Sapiens today in the same regions of Europe where they once co-existed with Neanderthals? Science has a tendency to write this off as genetic adaption, in effect natural loss of pigmentation in hair and skin due to less exposure to sunlight. Although, science has yet to explain why Inuits and Eskimos, who live in arctic regions, are not developing white skin and blonde hair, or why certain north African populations (of European ancestry) still have blond hair and green/blue eyes if evolution works as they claim.

So, it is fair to theorize that modern Europeans have acquired the skin and hair color, and probably much of the facial characteristics from interbreeding with Neanderthals. What else did they possibly get from their Neanderthal ancestors? How about a bigger brain?

Studies of Neanderthal skulls show that – on an average – the Neanderthal brain was slightly larger than that of Homo Sapiens. The capacity of the Neanderthal brain in terms of size was between 1,350 and 1,700 cubic centimeters with the average being 1,400 to 1,450 cubic cm. The mean cranial capacity of modern man (all races included) is 1,370 cubic cm, with a range of 950 to 2,200 cubic cm.

When we compare average brain size between Caucasian, Asian and African populations, we find that there is equally a difference. By adulthood, East Asians average 16 cubic cm more cranial capacity than Caucasians, who average 82 cubic cm more than sub-Saharan Africans.
Is it pure coincidence that the Homo sapiens that interbred with a parallel species of humans with an average larger brain capacity, has an average larger brain capacity than the Homo Sapiens that didn't?

I realize that this flies in the face of a lot of people, and that much of the criticism this text will get will focus on this postulation. Nevertheless, this is what a large body of research on the subject shows, and somehow we will have to deal with the data, rather than ignore it or consider it faulty or incomplete just because it doesn't show what we would like it to show. Once again, I do not value my friends because of their skull and brain size, neither because of their physical appearance, nor racial/cultural belonging. IMO, we shouldn't value any human being on these criteria.

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Whenever the larger Neanderthal brain is debated, paleontologists are in general quick to add that bigger brains does not necessarily mean smarter, and it is possibly so. Then again, paleontologists are not neuroscientists, and while this might be true individually, on average it is considered to have an impact on the performance of species. From an evolutionary perspective, it is considered unlikely that any species would develop a large(r) brain for no good reason, since the brain is the most energy-consuming organ in the body. It would kind of be like driving around in a big, expensive, gas-guzzling car that you can't really afford and don't really have a need for... well, that might work in America, but it does not work that way in nature.
Many studies have been made on dolphins, and why they've developed a big brain in the environment that they live. The most commonly accepted theory is that the social structure between dolphins imposes it, since a more complex social organization within a species tends to make for a brainier species. Cortical size relates directly to a pairbonding life style, and among primates cerebral cortex size varies directly with the demands of living in a large complex social network. Science also use that explanation to justify the bigger brain of a dog compared to that of a cat. Dogs and cats are more or less equal in intelligence and problem solving skills, but dogs have a whole set of social 'pack-related' skills cats never bothered to develop.
If we transfer the same reasoning to Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, and there is no reason why we shouldn't, we find ourselves with a problematic conclusion. While paleontologists refuse to admit it, Neanderthals should have been AT LEAST as intelligent as Homo Sapiens, and they should have been slightly superior in social organization. It makes sense from an environmental standpoint. The harsher climate of Europe (winters) meant higher demands on shelter construction, food sourcing and storage, clothing and the reliance on various tools and skills (such as fire) for survival. Neanderthals therefore developed the mental capacity for a better social organization, whereas the carefree, straight-out-of-Africa Homo Sapiens didn't have them to the same extent.

So in theory, when Cro Magnon arrived at the doorstep of Europe and had its first encounters with Homo Neanderthalensis, he should have been inferior in many ways. The Neanderthal was physically more robust and stronger. He was just as intelligent, but with a superior social organization and team spirit. He therefore probably hunted better in group, and was probably better at group warfare. He was better adapted to the terrain and the environment.

In more than one way he kicked Cro Magnon ass.

It also means that when we interbred with the Neanderthal, we acquired some of these qualities, rather than developing them through a slow evolutionary process, as the Neanderthal did. Today, when genetic engineers add pest-resisting genes to certain food crops, short-cutting natural selection, it's the same thing. The proverb goes. “If you can't beat them, join them”. Well, that's what Europeans and Asians did genetically.

But why then did the Neanderthal go extinct, and not us? I'll get to that shortly.

If Caucasians and Asians got some of the looks and the brains of Neanderthals, did they also get some Neanderthal mentality and behavior? We could ask that question by asking in what way – in a broad, general sense – these populations behave and reason differently to sub-Saharan populations. I personally have no clear answers, but I can tell you this. If Caucasian and Asian populations partially think and behave like Neanderthals, then I have a hard time relating this with the image of the Neanderthal as a brutish, slow-witted and inferior being, destined to extinction because of his incapacity to adapt.
After all, if you look at the European and the Asian populations, the theory of them interbreeding with a 'less evolved cousin' does not seem to add up. If so, it should have slowed them down, and taken the edge of their competitiveness versus the Homo Sapiens that did not interbreed. On the contrary, Caucasian and Asian civilizations have dominated the last 10 000 years of global history. They have dominated the 'non hybrids' (even enslaved them) with a fast pace of evolution, constantly pushing for innovations and evolution in society, technology, warfare, philosophical and religious thinking, etc.

Whatever they got from Homo Neanderthalensis, it seems to be an asset. And that's what doesn't quite fit with paleontological/anthropological descriptions of the Neanderthal as a rather static lineage of humans, who's tool kit didn't evolve over tens and thousands of years. Caucasians and Asians are the living proof of that.

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The founder of the R1b lineage lived over 35,000 years ago prior to the end of the last Ice Age in southern Europe and Iberia. Members of Haplogroup R1b are believed to be descendants of Cro-Magnon people, the first modern humans to enter Europe. Cro-Magnons lived from about 35,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithis period of the Pleistocene.

As to the extinction of Neanderthals as a separate line of humans, there are many different theories of what happened. One of the most favored theories right now seems to be that Homo Sapiens killed them off. It is convincing that we fought them. We fight each other, we fight anything that appears as a possible threat or competition, so why not Neanderthals? But how did we get the upper hand on a competitive human species that was physically stronger than us, and had a larger brain?

One theory says Homo Sapiens had developed weapons – such as projectile weapons (bow and arrows, stone slings, boomerangs) – that the Neanderthal didn't have and were unable to acquire. This somehow sounds unreasonable to me. Neanderthals could adapt to a harsh, climatic environment, they used and made tools, they buried their dead, made decorations, wore jewellery and make-up and were quite capable of abstract and symbolic thinking, but somehow they couldn't figure out how a bow and arrow worked and how to use it?
Other theories that they couldn't feed themselves or organize themselves as efficiently as Homo Sapiens does not fit with their supposed superiority in complex social organization.

Other theories postulate that disease or changing climatic conditions did it. As to disease, when Europeans arrived at the American continent, they brought with them diseases that wiped out up to 95% of the endemic population in some areas. However, from an evolutionary perspective, this was a rather fast process that flipped demographics radically in less than a century. It took roughly 10 000 years for the Neanderthals to slowly fade out, so it does not correspond with this type of scenario. As to changing climatic conditions, this can be checked scientifically, and we're still looking for that factor that could be responsible to the overall Neanderthal decline. None seems to fit.

One theory appeals to me though. Fertility rates. It is considered by paleontologists that Neanderthal demographics were always moderate. They never over-populated the regions were they lived, which leads us to believe that their fertility rate was low, or at least very stable. When Neanderthals and Cro Magnon co-inhabited Europe, their life expectancy was the same. But if Cro Magnon's fertility rate was higher than that of Neanderthals, they would slowly outnumber them, and get the upper hand, even if they were inferior to the stronger and brainier Neanderthal.

Consider this. Where in the world do we find the highest fertility rates (births per woman)? It so happens to be in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the top 20 nations in fertility, practically all of them are sub-Saharan populations. That is, the human populations that never interbred with Neanderthals are the world champions of fertility. This is not proof of anything, and fertility rates can also be explained with social and cultural factors. But isn't it another odd coincidence?

So perhaps, the 2% to 5% Neanderthal DNA that some of us carry have more influence on who we are than we think. And perhaps, just perhaps, the Neanderthal was as smart and accomplished as his invasive cousin from Africa. But Homo Sapiens bred faster, and eventually overwhelmed him.

PS: I am aware of the theories of Stan Gooch, which some of you may feel inclined to bring up. While Gooch can be seen as a precursor to this reasoning, let's just say that his pioneering theories on the interbreeding between Cro Magnon and Neanderthal and all that it meant to our culture and civilization IMO often are based on speculation, guesses and gut feelings rather than scientific data. He may well turn out to be right, I cannot speak for or against. The thing is, he didn't wait for science to back up his theories, therefore he lost much of his credibility in the eyes of the scientific community.

PS II: sorry for the lack of pictures folks, but this is all about ideas and not about sappy reproductions of what Neanderthals might have looked like.



Wikipedia; Neanderthal:
en.wikipedia.org...

Wikipedia; Neanderthal Genome Project:
en.wikipedia.org...

A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome:
www.sciencemag.org...

Some Neanderthals Were Redheads:
www.msnbc.msn.com...

BBC News; Neanderthal 'Make-Up' Containers Discovered:
news.bbc.co.uk...

Wikipedia; Race and Intelligence:
en.wikipedia.org...

Wikipedia; Neuroscience and Intelligence:
en.wikipedia.org...

Race Differences in IQ is Largely Genetic:
www.news-medical.net...

Wikipedia; Neanderthal Extinction Hypotheses:
en.wikipedia.org...

i like this post, i also totally understand how difficult it must be to write this objectivley as choocing your words correctly or the standard mentalists on this board will then claim you are being racist.

Maybe it has actually had an effect on the world as a whole, if you look at the way that certain regions advanced throughout there history it might be because of these extra genetics picked up from neanderthals?

europeans were certainley more into traveling/dominating/waring with the anyone (dicounting the persians and mongols, who for all intesive purposes fall under the same bracket if we go by your OP) maybe this is a drive picked up from our neanderthal side of genetics, also religon, most world religons (which have been forced on most people/country thorughout time) have came from asia and been used as a social tool by europeans,
maybe this is to do with the larger brain piece of info...

if dolphins need a larger brain for a more complex social interaction, and neanderthals had a larger brain and thus maybe a more complex social interaction maybe this is where the driving force to encapsulate large areas of the world under there religon came from (without it being somthing that is even realised)

Perhaps there is a reason why sub sahara peoples are better (as a rule) at runnning etc than there european counterparts because they are a "purer" version of the species, like a pedigree dog where as the europeans and asians would be more like a mongeral and thus not as great at thos type of tasks.

just thinking out loud after reading your post, its quite interesting, i no doubt believe there will be random racist comment left here, idiots saying your racist for your thoughts and the largest idiots of all claiming "im not decended from cave men" as we have seen so many times before on here.


Just my thoughts anyway.



Also...Yay... 100 posts

Originally posted by Heliocentric
Studies of Neanderthal skulls show that – on an average – the Neanderthal brain was slightly larger than that of Homo Sapiens. The capacity of the Neanderthal brain in terms of size was between 1,350 and 1,700 cubic centimeters with the average being 1,400 to 1,450 cubic cm. The mean cranial capacity of modern man (all races included) is 1,370 cubic cm, with a range of 950 to 2,200 cubic cm.

When we compare average brain size between Caucasian, Asian and African populations, we find that there is equally a difference. By adulthood, East Asians average 16 cubic cm more cranial capacity than Caucasians, who average 82 cubic cm more than sub-Saharan Africans.
Is it pure coincidence that the Homo sapiens that interbred with a parallel species of humans with an average larger brain capacity, has an average larger brain capacity than the Homo Sapiens that didn't?

It seemes that every since the results of this discovery has surfaced, people here have all of a sudden attempted to bring neandethals from the dumb cave men they were to all itelligent beings.

it turns out a newborn human’s brain is extremely similar to a newborn Neanderthal’s brain. Both are elongated, allowing them to move through the birth canal. (And both come at a cost to mothers: getting those big heads out makes for painful childbirth in both groups.) But by age 1, marked differences become clear. The human brain becomes more globular, less elongated, while the Neanderthal brain stayed elongated.

Brain shape and size don’t determine intelligence or creativity, but the authors of a new study suggest that the “globularization” of the human brain shortly after birth reflects important and extensive internal brain changes that make the human brain different from the Neanderthal brain. According to the study authors, this likely means that Neanderthals saw the world in a very different way than their human neighbors, and than we do today.

The brains of Neanderthals and humans were similar at birth but developed differently in the first year of life, according to a German study published Monday in the United States. Brains of newborn human babies and Neanderthals, who became extinct about 28,000 years ago, were about the same size and appear almost identical at first, said the research which appeared in the journal Current Biology.

But after birth and particularly during the first year of life the differences in development are stark, said lead author Phillipp Gunz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

"There was a huge difference in the way they grew their brain compared to modern humans in the first one-and-a-half and two years," Gunz told AFP.

To compare the two brains, scientists assembled a virtual Neanderthal brain by scanning skull fragments and comparing the computer models at different stages of growth to the human baby brain.

The human brain began much more activity in neural circuitry in the first year of life, which may have helped early Homo sapiens survive in the process of natural selection, the study said.

"The interesting thing is within modern humans, the size of the brain correlates only very weakly with any measure of intelligence," he said. "It's more the internal structure of the brain that is important."

"And the Neanderthal, they were smart because they had a huge brain," he added, "but we think that internal structures must have been different because they grew differently, so we don't think the Neanderthal saw the world as we do."

Neanderthals are believed to be modern humans' closest ancestor, and some scientists view both as the same species.

In May a landmark genome analysis determined that humans most likely interbred with Neanderthals, and that as much as four percent of the modern human genome seems to be from Neanderthals.

SOURCE DISCOVERY


So where neanderthals more intelligent?
I seriously doubt it. But I do not say this to make the argumetn that non-neanderthals are more superior. Or currently that any race is more superior. I just think its time to take this discovery for waht it really is. There is no missing link. You have Humans, and you have neanderthal, that had hot kinky sex, and created the majority of the european population. Thats all.

edit on 27/7/11 by AdamAnt because: (no reason given)