Bones of Contentions.

quote:

---

we have fossilized remains of children who seemed to have shared both neandertal and h. sapiens parentage in a smooth combination of features.

---

The last I heard, that was still a controversial conclusion. Has the scientific consensus changed?

Hi, arach.Here is a link on TalkOrigins. It contains a link to a 1999 paper published by the NAS on a possible neanderthal/modern human hybrid that was found in Portugal; it also has a link to a rebuttal, also published in PNAS.I couldn't find much that talked about this subject in more depth, but I confess that I didn't do an exhaustive search.

Hello, jcrawford, and welcome to EvC.Whenever you see a post that has a cool feature and you want to know how to use that same feature, click on "peek". That will give you the raw text that produced the post; it will allow you to find out how to use various features. If you click on "peek" on this post, you will see the commands that I use to make quotes.There are two types of quote boxes:

quote:

---

How do I reply with a quote since when I press the reply icon it only says "Reply without a quote." Thank you.

---

and The latter quote box allows you to include the quoted person's name: Hope you enjoy interacting here.

We could also ask similar questions in a sociological context.It is a fact that the prison population in the U.S. has a higher proportion of African Americans than the general population.It is a fact that in the United States that African Americans make up a higher proportion of people living in poverty compared to their proportion in the general population.These are facts, and they are not in dispute. It is not racism to point out these facts, unless one decides to make up an aribitrary definition of racism. It becomes racist when these facts are used to make conclusions about racial inferiority.

quote:

---

...The only true test of our common ancestral humanity is biological interfertily and human fossils don't tell us who they reproduced with or didn't.

---

This isn't quite true. Interfertility isn't necessarily a way to define "species". It doesn't work for species that reproduce asexually, for example, and it begins to break down with ring species. And, as you point out, it is problematic how to assign various fossils to particular species since we cannot test interfertility.The problem is that "species" are an attempt to categorize, and the boundaries of categories are always arbitrary. Nature rarely has distinct, cut and dried boundaries. I really don't see what the problem is. Whether we have distinct species, Homo erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. rudolfensis, H. floriensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens, or whether we lump them altogether in the same species is largely irrelevant.

quote:

---

Wow, she must have been some kind of WOMAN — since ONLY her lineage survived among all the supposed competing hominid type groups and sub-groups!

---

Actually, as PaulK points out, this isn't so surprising. It is to be expected.Consider all the people alive today. Now take a set that consists only of the mothers of this first group. Since a woman can have several children and we are excluding childless women, this second group must be smaller than the first.Now take all of the mothers of the women in this second group. Again, we are ignoring women who had no children or only sons, and one woman can have several daughters, so this third group is going to be smaller than the second.Likewise, if we take the set of all mothers of this third group, this fourth group will be smaller still.So, going backwards like this, we always have a set of females that are small (in numbers) than the previous group.Eventually, we will get a group that consists of a single female -- the common female ancestor of all of the women in the previous groups, and so of all the humans in the first group.As PaulK points out, this simply has to happen -- the only question is how far back do we need to go before we reduce the female ancestry to one? Perhaps only a few thousand years, perhaps we need to go all the way back to a mammalian ancestor in the Cretaceous.As it turns out, an examination of the mitochondrial DNA (which is usually only inhereted from the mother) suggests that this "mitochindrial Eve" lived about 60,000 years ago.

quote:

---

Yes, but chimps can't charge racism in our courts of law.

---

Neither can Neanderthal Man or Homo erectus.I'm getting lost. What's your point again?

quote:

---

only H. sapiens is regarded by them as full and equal members of the human race while H. neandertalis, erectus et al, are regarded as sub-human races or "species"

---

Since Homo neandertalensis et al. are not being denied jobs or other rights enjoyed by H. sapiens, it seems the point is rather moot.

quote:

---

...They tend to regard them as an extinct species of 'cave-men,' unworthy of even being considered full and equal members of some highly intelligent and more advanced Homo sapiens species!

---

Few, if any, "evolutionists" consider neanderthals to be "unworthy" in any meaningful sense of the word. So the points you are trying to make are invalid.

quote:

---

...According to Crawford and Lubenow.

---

Since neither Crawford nor Lubenow have a credible argument, there isn't much merit to the rest of the post.