First Human/Neanderthal Hybrid Found (Possibly)

Forgive me if someone already posted this.

http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-skeleton-provides-evidence...

Wasn't his name Dirk?

Diggler?

Thanks clammy -- hadn't seen that. My sense is that right now this is a topic -- understanding late Neanderthal morphological change -- just emerging and not yet clearly understood. Conclusions need to be careful, especially in that the matter is easy to confound with speculation and sensationalism. Is there anything more prurient and incendiary in paleoanthropology than the matter of Homo sapiens-Neandertal sexual contact?

A relevant perspective from John Hawks:

"In my view, we shouldn't assume more than we know, which is that both the frequencies and combination of traits of earlier Neandertals are much more strongly present in Mousterian-associated specimens than in other, mostly later, industries. I don't yet see a reason to exclude the hypothesis that this pattern reflects both evolution and migration into Europe. And as I wrote last year, the late Neandertals may represent both evolution and migration into Europe from a central Asian or West Asian source population."

That's a lot more sober than the Discovery article in the above link that offers "The research team hints that the modern humans may have raped female Neanderthals, bringing to mind modern cases of "ethnic cleansing."

Could we agree that this statement, while no doubt attention-grabbing, is perhaps a tad premature? :-0

Yeah, I thought that line was pure sensationalism.

That line proved to me that discovery.com is not a source for scientifically reliable information and is in fact shooting for fox networks reputation as a source of "reliable" information.

No to mention the use of "Love Child" in the headline. Yet this was the tamest of the articles on this topic I could find after seeing a blurb on my Google news page. (Though I admit I didn't spend a huge amount of time looking.)

Well, all that aside, it's a fascinating emerging area of discovery (small "d")

These hominid findings are coming fast and furious. Not only have Denisovians been discovered in Scandinavia and New Guinea (if I remember correctly) and scientists had no idea how they were related, but now they have identified Denisovian DNA in Spain:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/science/at-400000-years-oldest-human-dna-yet-f...

It is fascinating. At present, actually no Denisovans per se have been discovered in New Guinea, just that modern humans living there carry 6% of Denisovan genes. The only Denisovan fossil yet found is the single finger bone in Siberia. No Scandinavia either. What this may suggest is just how sparse the Hominin fossil record is. And how bushy the human ancestral tree is. So unlike the clear single branching lines of ancestry in the old textbooks.

See related topic: http://www.librarything.com/topic/161970