Neanderthal: New Images of an Ancient Enemy

[rickcharles606]

I believe that we are closely related and there is a missing link. RickCharles would be my best guess.

heeeey...I resemble that remark, lol. I'm not NEARLY hairy enough to even be in the running for the missing link ;-)

[sgreger1]

Also, the title of the post is "
Neanderthal: New Images of an Ancient Enemy "

The neanderthals weren't really an enemy. We didn't destroy them in warfare or anything. Humans were just more resilient (ironically due to our interbreeding with neanderthals which strengthened out immune system). I think the leading theory is that we ate up all the resources and adapted to environmental changes quicker so we survived.

[sgreger1]

I don't know...

Damn pinko communist Neanderthals!

[Premium Parrots]

I believe that we are closely related and there is a missing link. RickCharles would be my best guess.

[lxskllr]

Under no circumstances did they look like guerrillas though, not even a chance in hell.

I don't know...

[sgreger1]

I give him an A for effort, it's not easy to try to single-handedly attempt to rewrite history in the face of astounding evidence that goes against your theory. He's not a scientist anyways, just because he lined up the skull with an image of an ape in photoshop doesn't make it real.

Neanderthals didn't look too different from modern humans. They had WAY stronger upper body muscles though.



A reconstruction of a Neanderthal male from the Neanderthal Museum.






It's also difficult to really classify something a Neanderthal or a modern human. Evolution doesn't really work that way, there was a constant blending an changing of the genus we belong to. "Neanderthals" and modern humans were so genetically similar that we mated frequently and the children were not sterile. In fact all non-africans have neanderthal DNA in them from all the interbreeding. This really helped our immune system though which is likely what gave us the edge to beat them out in our quest for resources and ability to live in multiple environments.

Under no circumstances did they look like guerrillas though, not even a chance in hell.


Edit:

That is consistent with what we know about Neanderthal DNA i.e. that it's no closer to ours than to an ape's

WROOOOOONG. While we are close to modern apes of certain varieties, we are not close enough as far as our DNA to be able to mate and have non-sterile children. Neanderthals though are much closer to us on the spectrum which is why we were able to interbreed.

Here is a visual aid to help show you how much closer neanderthals are to use than any modern apes:

[Kaplan]

Wow, this is a book, and it sounds like the ultimate in scientific quackery. A Neanderthal skull bares far more resemblance to a human skull than an ape skull. I'll pass, thank you.

[lxskllr]

He certainly is qualified...

Danny Vendramini was born in Alice Springs, in the Australian outback. He had successful careers in a number of fields - as a theatre director, TV producer and award-winning film director and scriptwriter - before turning to evolutionary biology.

As an atheist and Darwinian scholar, Vendramini's work is anchored in evidence based research and deduction, but ultimately it is his artistic imagination and scientific creativity that distinguishes his evolutionary theories.

[wa3zrm]

http://www.themandus.org ^ | Vendramini


Danny Venderamini's main site.
Vendramini thesis on Youtube.


All Neanderthal images here courtesy of www.themandus.org
This thing starts off with Danny Vendramini figuring out something which should have been figured out 100 years ago i.e.. that (other than for the larger brain area) a Neanderthal skull is a near perfect match for ape profiles and a very bad match for one of ours:


That is consistent with what we know about Neanderthal DNA i.e. that it's no closer to ours than to an ape's. The funny thing is that Vendramini did not tell his artist to produce the world's scariest monster, the basic order was to start with Neanderthal skulls and skeletal bones and try to flesh them out using the assumption that what you had was a bipedal, carniverous ape with an 8" fur coat (like every other ice-age animal) and the big eyes which Neanderthal eye sockets suggest for nocturnal hunting, and possibly a slightly mean look on the thing's face. The fact that what turns up looks as bad as it does to us is probably, as Vendramini suggests, due to past bad experiences with it, sort of like the instinctive human reaction to spiders and snakes:

The 8" fur coat also explains why no Neanderthal needles have ever been found...
Without the fur coat:








Given the recent human population bottleneck, there is no way to believe that any modern human is related to this creature in any way other than for the possible re-use of low-level genetic components by an original designer or designers (the bottleneck says that if any human had any of this guy's genes we all would, not just Caucasians and East Asians), and likewise there is zero way to believe that any modern humans ever interbred with something like that. The image of the Neanderthal in popular culture and science turns out to be rubbish.
This thing was wiped out in some sort of a stone age world war and whoever wiped it out did the world a giant favor. Other than that, Danny Vendramini subscribes to a variant of the Gould/Eldredge flavor of evolutionism, nonetheless the scholarship involved in reconstructing what Neanderthals actually amounted to does not suffer from that.