The Demise of the Neanderthal Species Concept
Can you call a population a separate species when it shares its distinctive characteristics with another species, and interbreeds readily? A team of Romanian paleontologists, publishing in PNAS Nov. 3,1 re-evaluated some “poorly dated and largely ignored” skeletons of early modern human bones found in the Pestera Muierii region that, since 1952, had “never been integrated into paleoanthropology.” They redated them to more than “28,000 radiocarbon years before present,” making them pertinent to the time period when modern humans were said to be invading Europe. The researchers recognized that, taken together, the skeletons share diagnostic Neanderthal traits in a “mosaic” pattern. This calls into question the long-held belief that Neanderthals were a separate, more “archaic” species of Homo that was supplanted by the arrival in Europe of modern humans. Indeed, to these researchers, that position is no longer tenable:
Yet, as with many of these other early Upper Paleolithic modern Europeans, the Muierii fossils exhibit a number of archaic and/or Neandertal features, when taken in the context of Late Pleistocene Europe and potential ancestral populations. These include the large interorbital breadth, the relatively flat frontal arc, the prominent occipital bun, the mandibular notch shape and coronoid height, the relative notch crest to condylar position, and the scapular glenoid breadth. These data reinforce the mosaic nature of these early modern Europeans and the complex dynamics of human reproductive patterns when modern humans dispersed westward across Europe. Strict population replacement of the Neandertals is no longer tenable.
The early Upper Paleolithic human remains from the Pestera Muierii provide a further window on the biology and behavior of the earliest modern humans in Europe. The cranial and postcranial remains provide a morphological mosaic indicating the prior blending of regional late archaic human populations with those of in-dispersing modern humans. The behavioral contrasts between the groups must therefore have been modest, and this inference is reinforced by the functional implications of the Muierii 1 scapula.
See also National Geographic News and Live Science. They are more tentative, stating that the two groups “might” have interbred. The authors of the paper are more confident that they, in fact, did.
Update 11/09/2006: CNN and Science Now are reporting not only that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, but that our gene for a bigger brain came from Neanderthals. The CNN article has a picture of a Neanderthal in the pose of The Thinker (and with a Bowflex Body).
Update 11/24/2006: A large section of the Neanderthal genome was published in Science 11/15, and the surprising result is that it appears to be 99.5% identical to modern human (see Live Science for summary). That, along with a Nature announcement that modern human individual gene copy numbers can vary by as much as 12% between one another (see 11/24/2006) seems to clinch the argument that Neanderthal Man was not a separate species, but well within the range of human variation. Marvin Lubenow discussed the situation from a creationist viewpoint for Answers in Genesis.
1Soficaru, Trinkaus et al, “Early modern humans from the Pestera Muierii, Baia de Fier, Romania,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 10.1073/pnas.0608443103, published online before print November 3, 2006.
Is this latest update implying modern humans are the degenerates, and Neanderthalers were the supermen? My, how perceptions change. Next we will find out they were also morally superior and better philosophers.
Neanderthal Man is dead, as a concept. This find seems to nail the coffin. If these humans interbred freely with moderns, and overlapped with them, then they were the same species as us. It would be like finding two modern people groups with peculiar skeletal features at the extremes, that nevertheless interbreed and mix at the borders. In other words, if they lived at the same time and produced fertile offspring, and “saw each other as socially appropriate mates” as Erik Trinkaus (Washington U) put it, what sense does it make to separate them into two species? There was no Homo neanderthalensis, only Homo sapiens. OK, now that we know this, let’s undo the damage caused by the Myth of Neanderthal Man.
For over a century, these brethren of ours have been portrayed as subhuman by the racist Darwin Party storytellers. Though this view had been tempered somewhat in the last few decades, Neanderthals were still depicted as two steps back from us in books like F. Clark Howell’s Time-Life book Early Man that gave iconic status to the ape-to-man illustration (like this). Neanderthals were thought to be upright muscular hunters, but too stupid for language and art. Do you see the propagandistic danger of visualization? There never was a progressive sequence. Each member of this hypothetical chart was either an extinct ape or full human being; only Darwinian imagination based on the Victorian myth of progress thought otherwise. Neanderthal Man should have been placed beside modern man, not behind him in the parade. Anything else reeks of the European superiority complex over aborigines.
Funny, the news media that over-hype every early man story don’t show much remorse over this revelation. National Geographic, will there be a retraction? Did you also read Marvin Lubenow’s response to your Baby Lucy cover yet? (10/22/2006). Where is the red on your face? Mark Twain said, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” Live Science described what we should be seeing: “Blush biology works like this: Veins in the face dilate, causing more blood to flow into your cheeks, thus the rosy color. But scientists are stumped as to why it happens or what function it serves. That is, besides deflating your ego.” Sadly, some people don’t know how to blush, said Jeremiah. The solution is to replace one’s hardened ego with a more pliable one that can adjust to pressure. Hardened shells tend to explode.
