Why did the Neanderthals disappear?

All great questions John.
Another question thats been tickling away in the back of my mind is, imagine Homo Saps had of arrived 5-10 thousand years later.
Would Neanderthal man have then been pushed aside so easily or would that extra small period of time have given them the chance to rebound from what ever adversity may have affected them.
How different would life on this planet have been if not for the arrival of Homo Saps at that exact moment in time.
5-10 thousand years is only a drop in the ocean compared to the 1.3 million years when the first hominid left Africa.
Was it just bad timing/bad luck that did them in?

(edit for boo boo )

[edit on 29/10/07 by mojo4sale]

Originally posted by longbow
Again - for the people who think neanderthals and humans were crossbreeding - if this was the case, we would have to find the evidence of them LIVING TOGETHER in the same group. Basically in such case there would have to be significant amount of neanderthal skeletons mixed with cromagnon ones. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think such mixed group of skeletons was found. I think the opposite is true - they lived completely segregated.

Well theres not been a lot of skeletons found Fullstop. A lot of the really interesting cave sites were found over 100 years ago and not handled in a very professional manner at the time by amateurs, meaning layers were mixed up in the initial digging, see "Vogelherd skull" for evidence of this. Some sites were even destroyed during the second world war by allied bombing. Unfortunately relying on finding Neandertal and Homo Saps skeletons or artifacts together is going to be difficult. but there is circumstantial evidence.


Link

When we plot on a map the discovery sites of the last Neanderthals together with the first modern man, we then see that both lived for many thousands of years together in the same region, at the latest 40,000 years ago."

Did they have contact with one another? As soon as one becomes conscious of the period of time involved, it is perhaps more obvious to ask, "Could they have avoided encounters?" They roamed, lived, hunted and gathered in the same sphere for at least 10,000 years. This is a timeframe that, calculated from today, stretches back further than construction of the pyramids in Egypt. Of course they encountered each other. What is missing, however, is irrefutable evidence of relation- ships between the two races

This is the one i was thinking of, St. Césaire in France.

Link

Discovered by French archaeologist François Lévêque in 1979, the site contained a nearly complete Neanderthal skull, and a Châtelperronian tool kit, which is normally associated with Homo sapiens sapiens, not Neanderthal. It is considered evidence of co-existence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthalensis, a coexistence that doesn't seem to have been consistently pleasant.

Also this from a cave site in croatia, Vindija Cave.

Link

there are four to five stratigraphically separated hominin levels at Vindija Cave associated with humans and Neanderthals.

There are some other cave sites you can check out on archaeology.about.com.

I dont think we can rule out genetic mixing just because we dont have skeletons lying on top of each other.

Originally posted by DeadFlagBlues

Originally posted by runetang

Originally posted by St Udio
and suppose the story was really telling about the two races of men,
the Neanderthals=Esau ... the Homo-Sapiens=Jacob

Nice idea, but the Neanderthals were never that organized and civilized, to have a non-nomadic culture center to live at, wearing garments and having communal events. Big hairy Yeti looking blacksmiths smart enough with their big arse stub fingers to make swords and spear tips??

Plus Esau = Edom = Edomites are the modern day remnant of Esau. They say Edomites will play an integral role in the End of Days.

The remnant of Esau is likely the Palestinian peoples, IMO.

By far the most clueless, malformed, and poorly comprised excuse for a post I've read since I've been a member. Absolutely ridiculous.

Firstly, you cannot tie religion into any scientific forum, especially Christianity because the entire book is in opposition of scientific fact and common understanding of "the way things work."

Another mistake was your reference to the beautiful people of Palestine. You really have no idea what you're talking about what so ever. If you've never been or at least experience people from this region, you should bite your (forked?)tongue this very instance. They are good people who are not of any dissimilar genetic make up as you and I, or the rest of the world as suggested by articles such as this. Your bible has failed the world since it's inception. I don't see how a poor attempt at integrating it into scientific theory and giving some wildly lame speculation on a people you know nothing about is going to change that.


Religious psycho babble out. Level-headed, scientific, thought provoking information in. Deal?

Hey yo NEWB, let me show you a thing or two..

1) This is not a scientific forum/community, it is a conspiracy forum. Most "real" scientists would laugh at you for even saying that. Heck, this is an ORIGINS and Creation Conspiracy forum .. damn .. that has religion written all over it. Are you blind or just dumb & deaf?

2)What is your problem? Clearly you are out for blood, you are a persecutor.

The original post that was made which I quoted claiming descendants of Esau could've been the Neanderthals was SO silly I had to reply to that person and give them a real world equivalent for Esau. If you knew the history of the Bible, the history of Palestine, and the people of Esau as I do, you would know first off that being of Esau is not a bad thing! and secondly the Palestinians ARE the closest people to the modern descendants of Esau, they and the Lebanese, for this was the area in which Esau's remnant inhabited. They were never killed off.

Take all your unprovoked, hateful, ignorant left-field comments / insults built upon your hate and ignorance of other people's ideas and beliefs elsewhere buddy, because I can speak on science just the same. This is a history forum .. you cannot have history without religion, and if you do, religion never existed. Well we know thats not true, look at all these books and paintings and relics and blah blah blah.

Quote one sentence of psycho babble from the original post of mine (all of 3 sentences replying to someone else) that you replied to, with your hate infected flame overflowing with jade and bias.. you won't find it, because it isn't there.

All I said was, "Neanderthals have big stubby fingers, and Esaus' people in the Bible were not Neanderthals. Esaus people in the Bible are most likely modern day Palestinians."

So there, wheres the psycho babble, that required your long, scathing reply?

Just admit it, you jumped the gun over nothing because you hate Christians.

Glad im not you. I'm what you call tolerant of other people's beliefs, you obviously aren't. I don't think this is a very good place for you if you can't take reading references from the Bible; it ties in intricately with alot of the work and research and papers and posts people write on these forums. And you wont get anywhere very fast completely discrediting all religious evidence even from a historical only point of view.

[edit on 11/1/2007 by runetang]

reply to post by NGC2736

originally posted by NGC2736 What accounts for these two branches moving along at about the same evolutionary speed, in the same environment, and yet the newer branch all at once accelerating in such a way? The passing of the Neanderthal seems to be tied to this "outburst" of Modern Man, but the question is how? To answer one, we need to answer the other.

Its not necessarily what i believe, but your right NGC2736, from the time Homo Sapiens and Neandertals began sharing resources in Europe the advancement of Homo Sapiens as a superior hominid accelerated like no other species before, in all of Earth History i would imagine.

For 800,000 years we just meandered along, as did the other hominid species, then at a period around 30,000 years ago Neanderthals disappeared and Homo Sapiens evolved rapidly. Why?

Im not an advocate for alien intervention but something seems to have given us a competitive edge and a swift kick up the evolutionary butt around that time.

Interesting to ponder anyway, thanks.

mojo

Some more interesting articles that have turned up in the past week or two suggesting that the time we co existed with Neandertals was not as long as previously thought and why we should try to understand what happened to them and why.

The Scariest Thing about Neanderthals

And so why have these interesting people been relegated to second-class citizen status?

Because they threaten us.

Neanderthals are chronologically the closest, and the most familiar, example that we have of our kind disappearing off the face of the Earth, and that means we can go too.

Neanderthals scare us because they are ghosts from the past, a few with wizardly Weasley hair and a sprinkle of freckles, and they are now turned in our direction whispering, "You're not so unique. Watch out."

link



Perhaps they never met.

The number of years that modern humans are thought to have overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe is shrinking fast, and some scientists now say that figure could drop to zero.

Anthropologists also disagree on whether modern humans and Neanderthals are the same species and interbred.
And now, some scientists dispute whether they lived side-by-side at all in Europe.

The overlap figure shrank in February with new research by Paul Mellars of Cambridge University based on improved carbon-14 dating to show that modern humans started encroaching from Israel upon Neanderthal territory in the Balkans 3,000 years sooner than previously thought. This rate suggests Neanderthals succumbed sooner to big climate shifts or competition from modern humans for resources and that they might have overlapped for only 1,000 years at sites in western France.

Article on Mellars research

"This study suggests that the period of potential interaction was short, and also favors the idea that the impact of the newcomers was indeed a significant factor in the demise of the Neanderthals, something which has been disputed recently,'' said Stringer.

Related link on Aurignacian culture.

Aurignacian is the name of a culture of the Upper Palaeolithic located in Europe and southwest Asia. It dates to between 32,000 and 26,000 BC. The name originates from the type site of Aurignac in the Haute Garonne area of France. The Aurignacian culture is considered by some archaeologists to have co-existed with the Périgordian culture of tool making.

What we are learning is that what was true last week may no longer be true this week.
I think there is still a lot more to come.




[edit on 10/11/07 by mojo4sale]

I knew it, women are to blame.

Stone Age feminism?
Females joining hunt may explain Neanderthals' end

But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.

Just joking ladies.

Page 2

"All elements of [Neanderthal] society appear to have been involved in the main subsistence pursuit" of hunting large animals, Kuhn said. "There's not much evidence of classic female roles.
"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.
Not only would women suffer casualties, Kuhn said, their full participation in the hunt would mean they were not harvesting wild grains and other foods that could sustain their roving bands when game was scarce.

Makes sense. Not something i would have thought of.

In Charles Darwin's time, nothing was known about life at the cellular level. Protoplasm was the smallest unit they understood. Yet Darwin's theory of natural selection stated that all of life--every living entity known then or to be discovered in the future--simply had to function from birth to death by "natural laws" that could be defined and analysed. This would of course include the origin of life.

Darwin suggested life might have gradually assembled itself from stray parts lying about in some "warm pond" when the planet had cooled enough to make such an assemblage possible. Later it was realised that nothing would likely have taken shape (gradually or otherwise) in a static environment, so a catalytic element was added: lightning.

Throughout history up to the present moment, scientists have been forced to spend their working lives with the "God" of the Creationists hovering over every move they make, every mistake, every error in judgment, every personal peccadillo. So when faced with something they can't explain in rational terms, the only alternative option is "God did it", which for them is unacceptable.

So they're forced by relentless Creationist pressure to come up with answers for absolutely everything that, no matter how absurd, are "natural". That was their motivation for the theory that a lightning bolt could strike countless random molecules in a warm pond and somehow transform them into the first living creature. The "natural" forces of biology, chemistry and electromagnetism could magically be swirled together-- an event suspiciously close to a miracle.

Needless to say, no Darwinist would accept terms like "magic" or "miracle", which would be tantamount to agreeing with the Creationist argument that "God did it all". But in their heart-of-hearts, even the most fanatical Darwinists had to suspect the "warm pond" theory was absurd.

reply to post by andre18


I dont mean this to sound rude but i cant think of any other way of saying it.
What relevance does your post have to why the Neandertals disappeared?
Are you saying that Anthropologists are just making up reasons because of Creationists?
That doesnt make sense.

Sorry if i misconstrued what you meant.

mojo

reply to post by mojo4sale


When Darwinists present reconstructions of so-called "pre-humans", invariably they look nothing like humans.
Lucy and her Australopithecus relatives were little more than upright-walking chimpanzees. The robust australopithecines were bipedal gorillas. The genus Homo (habilis, erectus, Neanderthals and other debatable species) was a distinct upgrade, but still nowhere near the ballpark of humanity. Only when the Cro-Magnons appear, as suddenly and inexplicably as everything else, at around 120,000 years ago in the fossil record, do we see beings that are unmistakably human.

The Laetoli walkers lived 3.5 million years ago. Lucy lived around 3.2 million years ago. Recent discoveries show signs of pushing bipedal locomotion back as far as 6.0 million years ago. So let's assume for the sake of discussion that some primates were upright at no less than 4.0 million years ago.

Thus, from approximately 4.0 million years ago all the way to the appearance of Cro-Magnons some time before 120,000 years ago (95% of the journey), all pre-human fossils reveal distinctly non-human characteristics. They have thick, robust bones--much thicker and more robust than ours. Such thick bones are necessary to support the stress generated by extraordinarily powerful muscles, far more powerful than ours. Their arms are longer than ours, especially from shoulder to elbow. Their arms are also roughly the same length as their legs, à la Miocene apes. And in every aspect that can be quantified--every one!--their skulls are much more ape-like than human-like. Those differences hold from australopithecine bones to the bones of Neanderthals--which means that something quite dramatic happened to produce the Cro-Magnons, and it wasn't the result of an extinction event. It was.something else.

The chasm between Cro-Magnons (us) and everything else that comes before them is so incredibly wide and deep that there is no way legitimately to connect the two, apart from linking their bipedal locomotion. All of the so-called "pre-humans" are much more like upright-walking chimps or upright-walking gorillas than they are incipient humans. Darwinists argue that this is why they are called pre-humans, because they are so clearly not human.

But another interpretation can be put on the fossil record--one that fairly and impartially judges the facts as they exist, without the "spin" required by Darwinist dogma. That spin says that the gaping physiological chasm between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons can be plausibly explained with yet another "missing link".


(I'm trying to show how the evolution of humans from apes has holes, and so the only other alternative is aliens interfering in our evolution.)

The chasm between Neandertals and Cro Magnons is not so deep as you infer though. It has been shown that they had very good tool making ability, they made jewellery, they planned hunts, they had a larger brain capacity.
A theory that has been expounded is that the reason for our sudden leap forward in evolution may have had something to do with an event from beyond our solar system.........i'm at work so i'll have to post the link later.

Heres those links i promised.

Hyperphysics

But its most unique aspect is the production of anomalous cosmic ray events in a proton decay detector deep in Minnesota's Soudran iron mine. These events have defied analysis and have led to questions about whether Cygnus X-3 is a standard neutron star or perhaps something more exotic, like a star made of quarks. Cygnus X-3 is a compact object in a binary system which is pulling in a stream of gas from an ordinary star companion.

But no known particles can produce such events! Muons themselves are too short-lived to have traveled 37,000 light years so they must be secondary. The particles must be neutral to arrive with that precise directionality. They must be traveling at the same speed, essentially the speed of light, and there are no reasonable candidates for such a particle.

link, this is a link to a book by Andrew Collins, i am in no way advertising this book, merely posting these excerpts to promote some discussion.

COSMIC RAYS AND THE CYGNUS MYSTERY
Did Cosmic Radiation change evolution and kick-start religion?

What caused this sudden leap forward? The Cygnus Mystery proposes that it was a dramatic rise in cosmic rays reaching Earth - and provides evidence that the rays, which left subatomic traces in those same deep caves, emanated from a binary star system known as Cygnus X-3. These findings, Collins explains, challenged the certainties of the scientific establishment - until, in 2005, a U.S. think tank went public with its own conviction that a binary system producing powerful jets of cosmic rays triggered a rapid acceleration in human evolution during the last Ice Age.

I have a couple of query's regarding this but.... could a cosmic event have determined the demise of the Neandertals and the rise of Homo Sapiens?

reply to post by mojo4sale



"binary system producing powerful jets of cosmic rays triggered a rapid acceleration in human evolution during the last Ice Age."

That’s the most retarded sh!t............

“binary system" my ass, "powerful jets of cosmic rays " if pre-humans were affected in which "triggered a rapid acceleration in human evolution" every other animal on the planet, would go through the same changes........

Obviously, no evidence of that is shown......why would it affect pre-humans, but not anything else.......doesn't make sense....

Also, out of all the possibilities of what kind of affect such rays could do to the human brain, it some how made us smarter??? And changed our physical appearance some what......rays can do all that....? Imagine what it could do for us now, if it affected us again...

just a thought, has any scientist compared the dna of homo sapiens to neanderthal? whats the difference? whats the similarities? If we did breed with them, then we should have very similiar dna. Additionally, they could theoretically introduce Neanderthal DNA into a homo sapien egg to see if it gestates. If it does, implant that sucker see what happens.

Cheers,

Camain

Originally posted by andre18

"binary system producing powerful jets of cosmic rays triggered a rapid acceleration in human evolution during the last Ice Age."

That’s the most retarded sh!t............

Your classic mate, you think that idea is crap but in the same breath you think aliens zipping down here and changing our dna is worth discussing.

Originally posted by andre18(I'm trying to show how the evolution of humans from apes has holes, and so the only other alternative is aliens interfering in our evolution.)

It makes just as much sense as your hypothesis imo.

btw circumventing the censors is against the T&C.

mojo

reply to post by mojo4sale


Darwinists use the missing link to negate the fact that Cro-Magnons appear out of nowhere, looking nothing like anything that has come before. What they fail to mention is that dozens of such links would be needed to show any kind of plausible transition from any pre-human to Cro-Magnons. It clearly didn't happen--and since they're experts about such things, they know it didn't happen. However, to acknowledge that would play right into the desperate hands of Creationists and Intelligent Designers, not to mention give strong support to Interventionists like me. They face a very big rock or a very hard place.

Let's accept for the moment that in Darwinian terms there is no way to account for the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnons (humans) on planet Earth. If that is true, then what about the so-called "pre-humans"? What are they the ancestors of? Their bones litter the fossil record looking very unlike humans, yet they clearly walk upright for at least 4.0 million years, and new finds threaten to push that back to 6.0 million years. Even more likely is that among the 50 or more species of Miocene apes, at least a few are walking upright as far back as 10 to 15 million years ago. If we accept that likelihood, we finally make sense of the deep past while beginning for the first time to see ourselves clearly.

We can be sure that at least four of the 50 Miocene apes were on their way to becoming modern quadrupeds, because their descendants live among us today. Equally certain is that others of those 50 walked out of the Miocene on two legs. Technically these are called hominoids, which are human-like beings that are clearly not human. In fact, every bipedal fossil preceding Cro-Magnon is considered a hominoid--a term that sounds distinctly outside the human lineage.

So Darwinists have replaced it in common usage with the much less specific "pre-human", which not so subtly brainwashes us all into believing there is no doubt about that connection. And that brainwashing works.
We are further brainwashed to believe there are no bipedal apes alive in the world today, despite hundreds of sightings and/or encounters with such bipedal apes every year on every continent except Antarctica.

Darwinists brainwash us to ignore such reports by showering them with ridicule. They call such creatures "impossible", and hope the weight of their credentials can hold reality at bay long enough for them to figure out what to do about the public relations catastrophe they will face when the first hominoid is brought onto the world stage--dead or alive. That will be the darkest day in Darwinist history, because their long charade will be officially over. The truth will finally be undeniable. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and several relatives are absolutely real.

Originally posted by andre18
Darwinists use the missing link to negate the fact that Cro-Magnons appear out of nowhere, looking nothing like anything that has come before.

Are you serious? Cro-magnon was nothing like Homo Erectus, nothing like archaic homo sapiens?

Arago XXI, "Tautavel Man", Homo sapiens (archaic) (also Homo heidelbergensis)
Discovered at Arago in southern France in 1971 by Henry de Lumley. Estimated age is 400,000 years. The fossil consists of a fairly complete face, with 5 molar teeth and part of the braincase. The brain size was about 1150 cc. The skull contains a mixture of features from archaic Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, to which it is sometimes assigned.


Petralona 1, Homo sapiens (archaic)
Discovered by villagers at Petralona in Greece in 1960. Estimated age is 250,000-500,000 years. It could alternatively be considered to be a late Homo erectus, and also has some Neandertal characteristics. The brain size is 1220 cc, high for erectus but low for sapiens, and the face is large with particularly wide jaws. (Day 1986)

www.talkorigins.org...

When we have fossils that can be argued to be late homo erectus or early homo sapiens, I think it is likely there are just a few similarities.

Technically these are called hominoids, which are human-like beings that are clearly not human. In fact, every bipedal fossil preceding Cro-Magnon is considered a hominoid--a term that sounds distinctly outside the human lineage.

Humans are homonoids and so were cro-magnon, we are part of the superfamily hominoidae.

ABE:



[edit on 15-11-2007 by melatonin]

mojo, great thread. I was gone a bit, and then when I got back, I missed your thread till now. I have some catch up reading to do here now.

reply to post by melatonin


I'm not going to waste time and space here going over the mountain of evidence that is available in support of hominoid reality. If you care to inform yourself about the reality of hominoids, you won't have any trouble doing so. And the evidence is solid enough to hold up in any court in the world, except the court of public opinion manipulated by terrified Darwinists. However, I will go over a few points that bear directly on the question of human origins.

Let's grant a fairly obvious assumption: that the thousands of ordinary people who have described hominoid sightings and encounters over the past few hundred years (yes, they go back that far in the literature) were in fact seeing living creatures rather than Miocene ghosts. And no matter where on Earth witnesses come from, no matter how far from the beaten path of education and/or modern communications, they describe what they see with amazing consistency. To hear witnesses tell it, the same kinds of creatures exist in every heavily forested or canopied environment on the planet--which is precisely what we would expect if they did indeed stride out of the Miocene epoch on two legs.

Furthermore, what witnesses describe is exactly what we would expect of upright-walking apes. They are invariably described as having a robust, muscular body covered with hair, atop which sits a head with astonishingly ape-like features. In short, the living hominoids are described as having bodies we would expect to find wrapped around the bones found in the so-called "pre-human" fossil record. In addition, witnesses describe what they see as having longer arms than human arms, hanging down near their knees, which means those arms are approximately the length of their legs. Witnesses also contend that the creatures walk with a "gliding" kind of bent-kneed stride that leaves tracks eerily reminiscent of the tracks left at Laetoli 3.5 million years ago.

Now we come to the crux for Darwinists, Creationists and Intelligent Designers.
Evidence supporting the reality of hominoids is overwhelming. Truly. And if they are real, it means the "pre-human" fossil record is actually a record of their ancestors, not ours. And if that's the case, then humans have no place on the flowchart of life on Earth. And if that's true, then it's equally clear that humans did not evolve and could not have evolved here the way Darwinists claim. And if we didn't evolve here, that opens the door to the Interventionist position that nothing evolved here: everything was brought or created by sentient off-world beings, whose means and motivation will remain unknown to us unless and until they see fit to explain themselves. I hope no one is holding their breath.

The point is that the Miocene epoch had the means to produce living hominoids--50 or more different species (which almost certainly will be shaved down to perhaps a dozen as more complete bodies are found) as far back as 20 million years ago. It produced some with monkey-like arms better suited to an upright walker than a brachiating tree-dweller or knuckle walker.

By the time it ended, 5.0 million years ago, a half-dozen or more bipedal apes were on the Earth, which we know from the ape-like australopithecine and early Homo fossils. And we know from Laetoli that they had a walking pattern distinct from humans, which modern witnesses describe as still being the way hominoids walk. In short, they've followed the punctuated equilibrium pattern of long-term stasis.


[edit on 093030p://am3010 by andre18]

Originally posted by andre18
I'm not going to waste time and space here going over the mountain of evidence that is available in support of hominoid reality.

I can't see why if things like big-foot etc were found to exist they couldn't fit into evoltionary thinking.

But well done for ignoring my points.

reply to post by melatonin


youtube.com...
A Bigfoot Shooting: 14 parts

In a rebroadcast from June 5, 2001, Art Bell interviewed veteran Bigfoot researcher Robert W. Morgan. In the first half of the show, the two are joined by a hunter identified under the name "Bugs" who recounted his experience shooting two Bigfoot over 30 years ago in Texas. Bugs, along with two other hunters, encountered two 7-8 ft. tall creatures, covered in reddish brown hair, that they shot at numerous times, thinking they were bears. After the creatures were killed they discovered they had shot one female and one male. I had "never seen nothing on this Earth that looked like them," said Bugs, who described the pair as being a cross between human and ape. Not wanting to be held responsible for the shootings, the hunters decided to cover-up the incident by burying the creatures.

"Everything I've heard Bugs say has the ring of truth, " said Morgan who offered further analysis of the creatures: Bigfoot are intelligent, sometimes leave "gifts" such as turkey feathers for humans and their species could considered as the ancestor of homo sapiens.