DNA sequenced from Neanderthal tooth.

[Gogi]

O'Really is missing a tooth!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5052414.stm

[3waygeek]

1. I heard they found Bush family DNA n/t

[stepnw1f]

2. Bush and His Conservatives are the Missing Link (nt)

[Joanne98]

3. The link doesn't work.

[Ian David]

4. You mean there's a MISSING LINK? n /t

[Gogi]

5. I fixed it.eom

[Kerrytravelers]

6. So *this* is how far back in time the rethugs want to drag us...

:crazy:

[Warren DeMontague]

7. The "Jury Is Still Out" On Evolution.

Stop trying to lure peeeepul into temptation with your scientific witchery!

[xchrom]

8. i can't wait to read more about this.

i find the neanderthals fascinating.

this article does maintain the line that little or no cross breeding occured -- not a belief i personally share.

but then again i'm no authority.

[cally]

12. I know...I'm very excited by this

I'm fascinated about early humans and the neanderthals.

[theoldman]

9. Please do not insult the Neanderthals.

They are not related to Bush. They had to be pretty smart to survive several hundred thousand years. They were around much longer than we have been. I do not know where the myth started that they were ignorant brutes.

[Virginia Dare]

10. You took the words out of my keyboard....

welcome to DU!

:toast:

[SmokingJacket]

11. this is amazing!

Weirdly, I was just reading about Neanderthals the other day and was wondering if they could ever get DNA from them -- how cool to see how similar they are to us...

[johnnypneumatic]

13. it was always my opinion that they were smart and peaceful

they had bigger brains, it was just those asshole cro-magnons moved in and wiped them out, just like the native americans were wiped out when a different culture moved in, with a scorched earth technology killing all in it's path

[Odin2005]

14. Any evidence from your "opinion"?

They had bigger brains because they were more massive and muscular then us, thier brain was only larger in an absolute sense, not a relative one. There is little evidence for art and jewelry that would show they had the same capacity for symbolic thought then we do. We were also much better tool makers, Neandertals never made tools out of bone, horn, and antler and never reached the Upper Paleolithic technological abillity. Sometime around 100,000 ago we had some kind of change in our brains (what Anthropologists call the "Great Leap Forward" that put us ahead of Neandertals mentally and ushered in the Upper Paleolithic. We also seem to have been more efficient hunters. It wan't genocide, we just out-reproduced them thanks to our superior technology.

[johnnypneumatic]

15. have to admit it has been too long since I studied it

i'm not up on the current research. I think neanderthals actually were smaller, but built more robustly, muscular as you said, adapted to cold environments. Their brains were longer from front to back, oblong, while cro-magnons are more spherical, a shorter distance from any part to another, i don't know if that would equate to faster thoughts...
I believe there is evidence of some tools other than stone, but its true they didn't produce the variety or art, and seemed happy with the same unchanging stone tools for 100000 years.
I think what happened was they were stuck in a more specialized adaptation to their environment, and couldn't change fast enough when their environment changed, while the cro-magnon were still generalists, not specifically adapted to anything. Its possible the new people moved in and slaughtered their food supply, not necessarily direct genocide.
I think you are right the cro-magnon out reproduced them, the great leap forward could just as easily been a higher sex drive, they could have been more sexual, screwing anything and every thing, and more often, which would explain modern human behaviors :) less talk more action