Cast your Vote Evolutionists

Please respond yes or no."NEANDERTHALS ARE JUST LIKE MODERN PEOPLE"I would only like comments from evolutionists.Feel free to add details justifying your position.The Apostle

Why would you care about my vote. The anatomists who have studied them have made it clear they are NOT us. I'll go with their expert opinion. What I have seen of the differences is enough to convince me.You understand this isn't decided by a vote don't you?

My vote is No. Here is a good interactive view of the skulls of Neandertal and Cro-Magnon.Here is another view of the changes needed to turn a Neandertal skull into a modern skull.http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/staff/zolli/CAP/comparingNeand.htmI won't post anything else, I'll leave that to the scientists among us.------------------
Asgara
"An unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates via Plato

I vote for Phlogiston being the source of fire.C'mon people, if we get enough phlogiston votes, it's correct!(p.s., Apostle: Name the supposed bone condition; and, given the line of skulls that I presented in an earlier thread, which ones are "ape" and which ones are "human with bone disease", and explain why they all fit perfectly in line by isotopic dating, and why we don't find exceptions to the rule).------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Apostle, why don't you look at the information available and tell us what you think?

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"NEANDERTHALS ARE JUST LIKE MODERN PEOPLE"

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In general I would say no - but then there is the Dick Cheney exception to the rule (can you say "Free for All" forum?).MooseWhat Would Wellstone Do?
We've just past the 1 year anniversary of his death.
Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone dies in plane crash

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):

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| 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!

Hmmm, I was going to just say 'no', and mention being unable to see why Apostle would care what we think anyway.Then I thought: why is he asking? Why a yes or no?I can think of two possibilities.1) Maybe this is just an honest question, arising from my request in the Missing Link thread to substantiate, or retract, [his] claim that 'evolutionists' "agree with creationists that these individuals were just ordinary people".I hope that's what this is about. In which case, I (obviously) vote NO. Neanderthals were not (note, were, their lineage is extinct) just like modern people. And Apostle should by now realise this for himself, between my posts and that magnificent one from cjhs above. (Many thans for the refs! I don't recall the PNAS one, though the Cell one is well known of course. I think there was a recent item in Science on this too .)2) But being the cynical old whatsit I am, it occurs to me that this might be the start of a bit of half-baked Socratic questioning. He may be attempting to lead us to all say 'no' -- which is of course correct -- then follow up with a 'how do you explain X, Y and Z about them?' question. (Signs of culture, intelligence, tool use, whatever.)Maybe I am just an old cynic. But arguing with creationists does that. Basically, I wouldn't put anything past 'em.Cheers, DT

"Please respond yes or no". You have got to be kidding! Paleontologists and geneticists are still trying to figure out if Neanderthals were of the same species as Homo-sapiens. There's still a question open if Neandertals and Cro-Magnons interbred and produced a few modern europeans. I would 'lean' in the direction of saying no to your obviously black+white, either-or, yes-no question, because of the anatomical differences between early sapiens and neandertals, but the scientists are still looking for more fossils, signs of human culture, and interbreeding.
I think there are a few statements scientists make when trying to answer questions like the one you posted here. 1. The data is'nt all in yet, and 2. Wait and see.
I believe Science has only one field in which the researcher can absolutely say yes or no to a question. It's Mathematics.

Prozac, The question is "just like". That may not be a very well defined phrase but taking a reasonable definition of it we are pretty clearly not "just like" Neanderthals. Even if they are a subspecies of H. sapiens they are still not "just like".

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I believe Science has only one field in which the researcher can absolutely say yes or no to a question. It's Mathematics.

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Not even. Get high enough in math, and it all gets theoretical and abstract.

Yeah, some bloke called Godel really messed things up there...

Yea, it's true they were not "just like" modern humans or the Cro-Magnons who lived contemporaniously with them. There are still ?'s about how they died out, if they had kids with our ancestors, and to what degree they borrowed from early H. sapien culture and became more advanced in their own material culture. It would be really fascinating though if scientists determined that there people are alive today with even a very few Neanderthal herditary traits.

No, Godel demonstrates that there are *some* statements which can't be proved. It is still possible to give an unequivocal yes/no answer in math. Just not all the time.