Neanderthals and Modern Humans May Have Interbred
They lived together, they morphed into one another, so were members of Homo neanderthalensis really a separate species from Homo sapiens? Findings announced in Nature1 show a mixture of Neanderthal-like characteristics in modern human skeletons from Romania that led Science Now to state, “Oldest Europeans were swingers.” Because new radiocarbon dates of these skeletons put them in the transition period when modern humans were displacing Neanderthals, it is “possible that modern humans have a Neandertal ancestry or that humans and Neandertals may have interbred.”
The carbon dating is critical to the story. In the Nature paper, the scientists pretreated several samples with acid and yet worried about contamination. Results varied from 26,330 years before the present (bp) to 31,500 years bp in six tests. One tooth yielded ages of 27,370 and 31,500 years, even though it was found in an “excellent state of preservation in general and was therefore selected for dating as well.” They assumed the younger date was due to contamination. The team admitted that all the ages determined from the samples lie within “a time period for which a generally agreed calibration curve for the transformation of uncalibrated 14C ages [greater than] 20 kyr bp into calendar time ranges is not yet available. According to the existing, albeit divergent, 14C records for this period determined in different archives, a shift of the ‘true ages’ by several thousand years towards higher ages might be possible.”
1Wild et al., “Direct dating of Early Upper Palaeolithic human remains from Mladec,” Nature 435, 332-335 (19 May 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03585.
These bones reveal population variability among true humans. If they were capable of interbreeding, they fit the “biological species concept” of a single species. Neanderthals have long been used for evolutionary propaganda. The propaganda continues today, in spite of findings like this. For instance, a TV program on The Science Channel showed brutish Neanderthals happening upon the camp of more modern humans, unable to figure out who the strangers were and what made them so smart. The story is made up in the imagination of evolutionists committed to a form of evolutionary racism, calling modern humans “us” and Neanderthals “them.” It is no more legitimate than lumping Watusis and Eskimos into different species.
The original paper revealed uncertainties in the dating methods not reported by the popular press. Without Creation-Evolution Headlines, you might not have known that dates on the same tooth differed by 4,130 years, or that there is no calibration curve for the period assumed (for a discussion of problems with radiometric dating, see this article by Carl Wieland). The dating is driven more by The Tale of Human Evolution than by science. Since carbon dating loses accuracy rapidly after just a few thousand years, nothing in this story disproves that these were fully human individuals living relatively recently.