Examples of Dishonesty

Heh heh,
You keep bringing up topics I am rather familiar with Part of the problem i.e. misrepresentation, is that the cover of the Cell issue containing the paper claims neandertals were not our ancestors although this is NOT a conclusion of the paper since at the time it represented a single nea sequence which was compared to thousands of human sequences and multiple chimps. Where anyone would get the idea that neandertals were "half way" between humans and chimps, even from the pairwise sequence analysis is beyond me. Note in the figure that Sylas posted, there is a slight overlap of the neandertal and human distributions. Note also, the human pairwise distribution consists of thousands of human sequences whereas the neandertal is represented by a single sequence. Note also, this is mtDNA and says nothing about nuclear gene contributions.Anyway...a view of neandertal genetic diversity can be found here
with a comparison of relative genetic diversity of neandertals, humans, chimps, and gorillas which demonstrates (tentatively) that like H. sapiens and completely in contrast to other apes, neandertals were genetically relatively homogenous. If anything, it shows they were in all ways more like us than like P. troglodytes or P. paniscus.Krings M, Capelli C, Tschentscher F, Geisert H, Meyer S, von Haeseler A, Grossschmidt K, Possnert G, Paunovic M, Paabo S. A view of Neandertal genetic diversity.
Nat Genet. 2000 Oct;26(2):144-6.All in all, the neandertal work has been badly misrepresented by the press and overhyped as well.[This message has been edited by Mammuthus, 04-30-2004]