Half-Neanderthal Cavegirl
Although I haven't particularly looked into it closely, I do wonder how creationists deal with common descent in terms of different species in the genus Homo. Do they just bury their heads in the sand so as not to have to deal with problematic empirical data? This story is interesting and plays into the prevailing theory that now exists in that Neanderthals weren't outcompeted but were assimilated into the gene pool of Homo sapiens. As the BBC reports:
Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia.
Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together.
DNA extracted from bone fragments found in the cave show the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.
The discovery, reported in Nature, gives a rare insight into the lives of our closest ancient human relatives.
Neanderthals and Denisovans were humans like us, but belonged to different species.
"We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together," says Viviane Slon, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany.
"But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups."Is everyone part Neanderthal?
Present-day, non-African humans have a small proportion of their DNA that comes from Neanderthals.
Some other non-African populations, depending on where they live, also have a fraction of their DNA that comes from an Asian people known as Denisovans.
The fact the genes have been passed down the generations shows that interbreeding must have happened.
However, the only known site where fossil evidence of both Denisovans and Neanderthals has been found is at Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.
And very few - less than 20 - so-called archaic humans (those belonging to species other than our own, Homo sapiens) have had their genomes sequenced.
"Out of this very little number we find one individual that has half-and-half mixed ancestry, " Dr Slon told BBC News.
When other studies are taken into account, "you start to get a picture that over all of our evolutionary history humans always mixed with each other".When and where did Neanderthals and Denisovans live?
Neanderthals and Denisovans are known to have overlapped in time in Eurasia.
The two groups lived until about 40,000 years ago; Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east.
As Neanderthals migrated eastwards, they may have encountered Denisovans at times, as well as early modern humans.
"Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have had many opportunities to meet," says Svante Pääbo, director of MPI-EVA.
"But when they did, they must have mated frequently - much more so than we previously thought."What do we know about the girl and her family?
The girl's story has been pieced together from a single fragment of bone found in the Denisova cave by Russian archaeologists several years ago.
It was brought to Leipzig for genetic analysis.
"The fragment is part of a long bone, and we can estimate that this individual was at least 13 years old," says Bence Viola of the University of Toronto.
The researchers deduced that the girl's mother was genetically closer to Neanderthals who lived in western Europe than to a Neanderthal individual who lived earlier in Denisova Cave.
This shows that Neanderthals migrated between western and eastern Europe and Asia tens of thousands of years before they died out.
Genetic tests also revealed that the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor further back in his family tree.
Answers in Genesis (AIG) state:
Most creationists consider Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, and some other fossil groups as representatives of extinct people groups, not evolutionary dead ends. Interpretation of fossils from an evolutionary perspective is not compatible with the teachings of the Bible. The fact that chimpanzees and humans have similar DNA does not make them evolutionary relatives. Humans did not evolve in a series of random accidents from an apelike ancestor—they were created in the image of God. The Bible makes a clear distinction between man and the animals. Man is given the ability to fellowship with God and given dominion over the animals. Evolutionary ideas about the rise of man from apes has fueled racist attitudes and set the stage for such atrocities as the Holocaust. Humans were specially created by God and are not simply highly evolved primates.
The fact that AIG also say: "Neanderthals coexisted with modern humans and were an evolutionary dead end that left no descendants" shows that they do not know what they are talking about because that is not the prevailing theory. It is distinctly distasteful that Answers In Genesis would poison the well of ideas by making reference to terrible events in terms of human evolution. They are equating, to the reader, the idea that evolution Is morally equivalent to the Holocaust, for example.
Humans are the result of either a cosmic accident orchestrated by time and chance or the special creative act of God. Evolutionists once viewed Neanderthals as dumb, cave-dwelling brutes that were less than human, but creationists have always argued that they were fully human. Neanderthals lived in very harsh conditions where disease and nutrition may have produced some of the skeletal features seen, and many evolutionists are beginning to accept the creationist view of Neanderthals as an extinct human people group—not a missing link.
Tragically, other human people groups have been considered missing links and treated in barbaric ways. African Negroes and Australian Aborigines were sometimes considered less evolved humans. A century ago, Darwin’s idea encouraged the slaughter of Aborigines, and some were even prepared as museum specimens. It also gave credence to Hitler’s plan to exterminate the “inferior” Jewish race.
Still, cognitive dissonance is strong in these ones:
Neanderthals present a challenge to Christians who believe that soulless humans came before Adam. There is conclusive evidence that Neanderthals and humans lived at the same time. Recent discoveries of a humanlike hyoid bone, burial practices, musical instruments, weapons, and other signs of culture have started to shift the picture in even the evolutionists’ minds. Evidence of hybridization between humans and Neanderthals, DNA comparisons, and the indications that they lived together for 100,000 years of evolutionary time point to the fact that they were fully human. This evidence contradicts evolutionary assumptions and supports the biblical position that Neanderthals simply represent some of the variety that was programmed into the human genome by our Creator.
And it is supposedly a problem for more liberal theists as much as for us evolutionist types, not the biblical literalist:
Another difficulty for evolutionists is evidence that Neandertal Man lived at the same time as modern man and “archaic Homo sapiens”, sometimes in the same area. This creates big problems for those professing Christians who, like Hugh Ross, generally accept secular dating methods. Since they cannot date Adam back too far without stretching the genealogies beyond recognition, any human-type skeletons “dated” earlier than a few tens of thousands of years ago have to be written off as pre-Adamic “soulless” quasihumans. Biblical creationists believe Neandertal Man was just a unique variant of modern man who lived in Europe and adjacent Asia and North Africa after the Babel dispersion in the Ice Age (the aftermath of the Flood7).
Essentially, and I don't particularly care if this sounds insulting, but I am past the point of particularly caring. Creationists make stupid arguments and I have little time for their nonsense.
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