Neanderthal eye sizes and other problems

in #science4 years ago

Danny Vendramini's little video describing the Neanderthal:

Late 19'th century scholars had a pretty good idea of what they were seeing in Neanderthal remains, note Ignatius Donnelley's description and/or Marcellin Boule's reconstruction:

But, increasingly within past decades as Danny Vendramini notes, the Neanderthal has been enlisted as a sort of a poster child for kum-bay-ah pseudo-religion. Yuppyism poisons science and that is basically yuppyism. Vendramini's reconstructions are fabulously different from what you normally see in journals and popular media:

But the hell of it is that Vendramini's reconstructions actually correspond to everything we actually know about Neanderthals:

• Neanderthal DNA was roughly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee. That eliminates any possibility of humans being descended from Neanderthals via any process resembling evolution.
• His skull was a very good match for an ape's profile, and a bad match for a human profile.
• No Neanderthal needles (Cro Magnon needles are common); a creature with a 6" ice-age fur coat simply doesn't require needles...
• Footprints more apelike than human.
• Rib cages were conical as are those of primates (to make room for the gigantic upper body musculature); our rib cages are cylindrical.
• Eye sockets and nasal areas much larger than ours.
• Placement of noses and eyes on faces much different (higher) than for humans.
• We know that the mindset of the Neanderthal was similar to that of an African lion. He viewed the living world as neatly divided into two categories: his own family group and meat. Even other Neanderthal families were on the menu, and they find the remains of Neanderthal groups with clear butchering marks made by flint knives.
• We know (Rob Gargett) that if you put the skulls of a human, a Neanderthal, and lion together, the two which have much of anything in common are the Neanderthal and the lion.
• We know that Neanderthal population dynamics were similar to those of other predators, and that there were never more than around 10,000 – 15,000 Neanderthals alive on the planet at any one time.
• We know that the Neanderthal could adapt to an omnivorous diet when it was available but that, in the setting of the European ice age, he was for all intents and purposes a pure carnivore.
• We know that Neanderthals were not giants... a tall one might go 5-10 or 6'. But a male Neanderthal could easily have stood 5-9 and weighed 300 pounds with no extra weight on him.

Rob Gargett ("Subversive Archaeologist") has noted that even if we try to draw a totally humanized or yuppified Neanderthal with the eyes and nose as big as the bones indicates they would have to have been, what we end up with is still outlandish:

Danny Vendramini also proposes a theory of human evolution which has predation BY Neanderthals driving more gracile hominids into a fast Gould/Eldredge style process of evolution into Cro Magnon man and that is likely as close as you could come to describing human origins in evolutionary terms but, to my own thinking at least, that doesn't really work.

All of the fancy tools, weapons, and artwork of Cro Magnon people were in place on the first day they ever set foot on Earth. That is not compatible with believing that Cro Magnon man evolved from hominids. There would be evidence of some sort of a run-up to all of that in those Skhul/Qafzeh caves, and there simply isn't any. Gracile hominids were just hominids.

"a bit hairier than us, with a larger nose …" Hmmm...

There is more to it than that. Again, Neanderthal DNA is actually a bit closer to that of a chimpanzee than t o ours; you have to ask yourself what you'd expect such a creature to look like. The Neanderthal was basically a very advanced bipedal ape with the same kind of huge dark-world eyes that you still see with owls, lemurs, tarsiers, bush-babies and other older creatures of the world. The reason for the dark-world eyes is another sort of a long story.

So how much neanderthal DNA is actually present in humans? Was there cross speciation?

"Was there cross speciation?"

The standard answer to that is yes; my own answer is no. I believe that Svante Paabo and others at Max Planck are making a logical error in assuming that common DNA implies past interbreeding. For starters, horses and donkeys are very much closer one to the other than humans ever were to hominids and all mules are sterile.

There is a claim that, because some humans have a certain small number of genes in common with Neanderthals, that humans and Neanderthals must have interbred. That amounts to thinking that a Neanderthal male could/would rape a woman and, rather than cooking and eating her afterwards as usual, somehow or other keep her alive long enough to bear a cross-species child, raise that child to reproductive age, and have him/her breed back into human populations without anybody catching on, i.e. the claim is ridiculous.
In real life:

• Neanderthal females would kill that woman the first time her new owner left her alone for ten minutes.
• The woman wouldn't fare any better than the subjects of the commie attempts to breed humans and apes into super workers in the 1930s.
• Humans would notice the child was different (really different...)
• And humans would kill that child and everybody else like him as part of the same program which killed out the Neanderthal. They would not need DNA tests to determine who to kill for that sort of reason, it would be exceedingly obvious.

The Neanderthal died out in a wave going from East to West as he encountered Cro Magnon humans with the last Neanderthal stand in Europe being in Southern Spain. There is just no way that humans who were conducting such a total genocide war would have tolerated half-breeds in their own midst. That is, even assuming that such cross-breeding was possible.

And the hell of it is that, even if it had been possible, it would have had to have been COMMON for it to have left any detectable traces in the present human genome. That, of course, is ridiculous to the tenth or twelth power.
But what about the common genes, you ask? There actually is a way that Neanderthal genes could have gotten into the modern human genome in such a way as to be recognizable and that involves bacterial insertion of genes which is a known process.

They say you are what you eat..... The first experience modern humans ever had with Neanderthals was watching friends and family members being killed and eaten by them. Eating a Neanderthal which had been killed in battle occasionally would have simply amounted to sending the Neanderthals a message in their own language.

I said the reason for all of this is a long story..... And it is a story which pretty much requires you to jettison pretty nearly everything you might have ever thought you knew about human or solar system origins.

This stuff goes back to the foundation of our solar system and our world and you have to start by thinking back on what we were being taught in our schools, what they wanted us to believe. In general, we were taught that:

  • The universe began in some sort of an inexplicable “Big Bang(TM)”, around 17 billion years ago.
  • Most if not all of everything that goes on in that universe is explained bygravity, with electromagnetic forces playing little if any role.
  • Our own solar system formed up from swirling dust around 4 billion years ago.
  • Our system has looked pretty much as it does now for most of that time.
  • Life on our world has arisen via random processes (evolution) over giant spans of time.
  • The general history of our planet involves slow and uniform processes.
  • The stories about major catastrophes you read in ancient literature are fairytales.
  • Space and time are deformable.
  • Albert Einstein was the smartest man who ever lived.

Now, in real life, it turns out that every bit of that is a bunch of BS but, in this case, you have to start with dwarf stars. Stars are not thermonuclear engines as you might have been told; they are basically lightning rods, focal points of cosmic discharge driven by cosmic Birkeland currents. A sunspot is a spot at which the electrical activity breaks down and you are seeing into the interior of the star, If stars were thermonuclear engines, sunspots would be blue or white, and not black.

When a dwarf star such as Jupiter and Saturn used to be is captured by a main sequence star, the dwarf star dies out and becomes a gas-giant planet since the dwarf star would no longer be the focus of any kind of a discharge at that point.

All of the world's old religions were astral in nature; nonetheless and counterintuitivelly, the two chieftain gods of all of those astral pantheon systems were Jupiter and Saturn, the two former dwarf stars (google search on Saturn theory). Vestiges of that system are still all around us. We still call our sabbath "Saturn's Day"; the chief Roman holiday was "Saturnalia"; Virgil notes (Aenid) that Rome itself was built over the ruins of an older city called "Saturnia"; Plato consistently refers to antediluvians as "Nurselings of Kronos(Saturn); Ovid and Hesiod claim that there had been a "Golden age" prior to the flood when Saturn/Kronos was the "King of Heaven", followed by the flood, and then a brief silver age in which Zeus/Jupiter was king of heaven, and then by the age of the Trojan war and then our present age.

In the same language, our sun is the "King of Heaven" now.

The ancients were expressing a worldwide common belief that Earth had once been aligned with Saturn and not with out present sun and that Saturn had been a dwarf star at that time.

Troy McLachlan describes the world which the Neanderthal lived in, and what life would be like on a planet either in phase lock or electromagnetic alignment with a dwarf star:

http://www.saturndeathcult.com

There is a bit of a learning curve to that one, not least of all due to the fact that you have to first unlearn all the public school stuff....

Consider... The Neanderthal has been viewed as a primitive human rather than as an advanced ape (which is what he was) mainly due to the size of his brain which was a bit larger than ours.

But our brains are dominated by the frontal area which is involved with complex logic; the Neanderthal brain was dominated by the area of the brain associated mainly with vision. Combine that with the huge eyes, and what you come to is that the Neanderthal brain was largely the neurophysiological equivalent of the circuitry of a military night vision device.

All dinosaurs had the same kinds of huge, dark world eyes by the way.

https://www.seeker.com/dinosaurs-that-loved-the-nightlife-1766197837.html

Earth, some tens of thousands of years ago, was an ideal environment for the Neanderthal and for other creatures like him.

However, humans and dolphins, with the smallest relative =ye sizes of advanced creatures, could not plausibly have arisen in that same environment. Humans perforce, had to have somehow come here from somewhere else.

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This post is excerpted from a thread I started on the voat forum. One part of the thing had gotten lost either via a software flaw or due to moderation activity of some sort (and reinserted here) so that simply posting a link to the thing would not suffice.

Notice that this kills any ideas about human evolution from hominids. Humans and hominids require different kinds of home worlds.