Cast your Vote Evolutionists

NoThis is not difficult stuff. I am quite content to agree that Neanderthals were fully human, but that is a different claim. The differences between Neanderthal humans and humans living now are clear.There are many ways to distinguish Neanderthals from so called modern humans. I say so-called, because Neanderthals overlapped modern humans in time. The characteristics of living people which are different from the Neanderthals are not more recent in time than the Neanderthal characteristics. We just happen to be the ones who did not become extinct. They are our cousins, not our ancestors. (Caveat: the question of whether there may have been some gene flow remains open. Evidence currently suggests not, but stay tuned. The evidence so far is not completely conclusive.)One class of evidence is mitochondrial DNA, which has now been sequenced from a number of Neanderthals, and consistently shows them to be plainly distintinguished from modern human mtDNA. Here is a diagram linked from the Fossil Hominids: mitochondrial DNA FAQ by Jim Foley. The original figure is from a 1997 article on the mtDNA analysis by Krings et al. I've read the original article also. There is a serious omission from this diagram, which contributes to a common misunderstanding. It looks as if the Neanderthals are in between us and chimpanzees. That implication is false. The figure does not give numbers for the Neanderthal chimpanzee differences, which is a great pity. Those numbers happen to be the same as the human chimpanzee differences.Here is a table of numbers, transcribed from another article by the same authors (Krings et al, 1999):

-------------------------------------------------------------
| Pairwise      |    Human      Neandertal     Chimpanzees  |
| Differences   |                              and Bonobos  |
|---------------+-------------------------------------------|
|               |                                           |
|Human (663)    | 10.9 +- 5.1   35.3 +- 2.3    93.4 +- 7.1  |
|               |    (1-35)       (29-43)        (78-113)   |
|               |                                           |
|Neandertal (1) |                              94.1 +- 5.7  |
|               |                                (84-103)   |
|               |                                           |
|Chimpanzee (9) |                              54.8 +- 24   |
|and Bonobos    |                                 (1-81)    |
-------------------------------------------------------------

Note that Neanderthals are, within the limits of measurements, just as different from chimpanzees as modern humans are.This is a consequence of evolutionary relationships from common ancestors. The Neanderthal humans are just as evolved from our common ancestors as we are, but they have diverged somewhat in their own unique evolutionary development.The numbers in the figure do not match the table, because it is a different study with a different sample of DNA. A larger sample, for example, will have more pairwise differences. What matches, consistently in all the analyses that have been done, is the relative genetic distances of the three species.Cheers -- cjhsReferences:Krings M., Stone A., Schmitz R.W., Krainitzki H., Stoneking M., and Paabo S. (1997): Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell, 90:19-30.Krings M., Geisert H., Schmitz R.W., Krainitzki H., and Paabo S. (1999): DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable region II from the Neandertal type specimen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 96:5581-5.

Hot damn, Asgara. Awesome links!