Re: Homo erectus, city dweller and sailor

On Sep 9, 6:05 pm, Tom McDonald <kilt...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
veritas wrote:
On Sep 9, 10:04 am, "J.LyonLayden" <JosephLay...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 9, 4:02 am, veritas <khogan...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>





That Neanderthal hybrid report is from 2007, not 1942.
And the Cambridge DNA test doesn't mean anything if the descendents
of neanderthal/Hss hybrids died out before they started testing the
modern people with which to compare ancient DNA to.

For instance, if the last surviving descendents of neanderthal hybrids
were an isolated and now extinct race like the Gaunches of the Canary
Islands or a similar pocket population, we would not have their DNA to
test.

Good point. I never considered the possibilty. The Neanderthals were
so damn ugly! It would have to have been the men taking the women.
Modern man couldn't have looked at one them and said, "She reminds me
of Salma." But that is a point I had not considered and should be a
possiblity if breeding were possible. (Still debating that one.)
Thanks, and regards, Ken

First, would you (and others) please consider snipping the bits
of prior posts to which you are *not* replying? While Google
Groups does truncate prior posts, most real newsreaders (I use
Thunderbird) do not. This means scrolling through, sometimes,
screen after screen of old posts that are nothing but dead weight.

Second, modern men *** sheep. Beauty ain't in it--and until
quite recently (look at early 20th century pornography as a
fer-instance, or early photographs of married men and women
period), beauty was irrelevant to mating.

It may well be true that different varieties of Homo didn't see
other varieties of Homo as mates generally. In much the same way,
many species of animals that we think of as remarkably similar
don't (usually) try to mate outside of their species. But this
does not mean that it didn't happen.

A vertebrate paleontologist who thought about this sort of thing,
a Swedish Finn named Bjorn Kurten, wondered whether the
extinction of H.s.n. (or H.n. if you must) might have happened
without conflict between H.s.n. and H.s.s.

He knew that one of the things that distinguishes H.s.s from
H.s.n. (and other great apes, come to that) is what is called
'neotony', which is the persistence into adulthood of child-like
features. IOW, H.s.s. adults would look oddly like H.s.n.
children to Neandertals. Since all of the great apes have as a
survival strategy the inherent drive to protect their young, he
postulated that perhaps H.s.n. women would see H.s.s. men as
objects for nurturing and care, whatever their differences otherwise.

He further postulated that this would not work in the other
direction; H.s.s. women would tend not to see H.s.n. adult males
with an affectionate eye. This would, without conflict between
the groups, tend to lead to matings between H.s.s males and
H.s.n. females, and not the reverse.

Or we could think about it in the brutal way in which mating might
have been done at that time:

Neanderthal men can rapoe Hss women, but if a cro-magnon tries to rape
a Neanderthal woman he gets his ass kicked.


He further postulated that some relatively large percentage of
the H.s.s./H.s.n. matings would produce infertile offspring; that
we, like horses and donkeys, might be able to have offspring, but
that they might tend to be 'mules', and not themselves be
particularly fertile.

Now if the production of H.s.n. children was reduced by even a
small amount by such matings, in a remarkably short period of
time, H.s.n. populations would crash, and extinction would
follow. Without a drop of blood being shed.

He wrote a couple of novels that explored this and other, similar
issues. The best, IM(nsh)O, was, _Dance of the Tiger_. Think
'Clan of the Cave Bear' without porn, or 'The Inheritors' with
better science.

Kool- gonna check that out.


As an author yourself, I think you might find Kurten's treatment
of the issue interesting; and you might even find that it is
possible to write an effective novel about our forbears and their
neighbors based on sound science.- Hide quoted text -

I want sound science. However my goal is to write it from the
perspective of a fantasy fan. So tailored clothes like CM, and just
"knife" without the adverb "flint" being necessary.


- Show quoted text -


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