tom wrote: ↑December 3rd, 2017, 11:27 pm
The anatomical reconstructions use Humans as the template which would lead to false results. Neanderthal bones are twice as thick as Humans, this would lead you to think they were muscled more like a chimp or gorilla.
It could also be characteristic of humans with dense muscle mass. And who is to say that gravity has been constant throughout history? It's an assumption scientists may make, but assumptions are assumptions.
In the 19th century and early 20th century, artists apparently used large apes as the template for how to reconstruct the face of Neanderthals. I don't know the in and outs of how they do facial reconstructions, like the one they used to reconstruct the face of King Tut. I'd imagine there is some art involved. Skin tone and body hair are probably a guess, or informed by other research. The bone shape wouldn't tell you skin color or hair style.
Do you really know enough about these facial reconstruction methods to know that the reason they make Neanderthals look like (unattractive, white) humans is because they are using humans as a template, and not because of their knowledge of how to reconstruct faces? Do you know that, or is that just your guess based on the idea that you believe in a gorilla-looking ape.
It's counter-intuitive to think that Neanderthals was so different as to look like gorillas and yet be able to reproduce with humans and produce fertile offspring.
Scientists say whites and Asians have Neanderthal genes, but for the most part, Africans do not. Whites might get their prominent noses from some other source, but if whites are more Neanderthal, might not Neanderthals have had larger noses that protrude out more? Those using modern facial reconstruction techniques depict them that way.
And the eyes in these reconstructions are also clearly completely wrong. Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe, there is no evolutionary reason they would become hairless under freezing conditions.
Europeans, people said to have the most Neanderthal DNA, tend to be hairier than Africans. Hair is probably the choice of the artist or facial reconstruction guy. Once the scientists say Neanderthals are human, they make them look human on the exterior, the parts not covered by the facial reconstruction methodology they are using. I don't sculpt this stuff, so this is my conjecture. I've just seen them on documentaries. They think some of the Neanderthals had red hair and freckles. They may have looked like people that, if mixed would blacks from Africa, would look Caucasian. That would be an oversimplification.
Why don't white people look like big gorillas if Neanderthals were gorrilla-like?
Some people-groups throughout history have been violent, and some of been cannibals. Tribes have fought wars against each other. They didn't have to be apes to do that.
I just noticed that 19th century anthropologist with far fewer scientific tools guessed much closer to this. There misconception was to think Neanderthals were not very smart, the opposite seems to be the case. They were very smart brutes, real monsters. Our past with them is very violent.
Humans have certain fears hard wired in like for instance a fear of snakes, this fear is universal. The universal fear of the Bogeyman, Sasquatch, Yeti, and many other forest monsters was what Danny Vendramini was tiring to find an explanation for.
That is an extremely silly argument for Neanderthals being gorillas. There are all kinds of dangerous animals on the planet that people are afraid of them. Gorillas can be dangerous, and they look exactly like gorillas. You seem to be making a pseudo-science ev. psych. argument for human fascination with hairy human-like monsters being proof that Neanderthals must have been ape-like.
Do most cultures even have a legend about a Sasquatch or a Yeti? There are beliefs in a variety of monsters. It's not all that uncommon to portray foreign invading armies as animal-like, even if they are human. The Anglo-Saxons are presented in animalistic terms in the writings of monks who told how they attacked the Britons. The Norse vikings who invaded are presented in a similar way by the writings Anglo-Saxon writings of later eras. Fear of invading armies, along with local beliefs about the supernatural and other experiences can lead to stories of ogres, trolls, and other creatures.
And if people passed stories down like these because there were some smart dangerous critters that looked ape-like running around, why would these creatures have to be Neanderthals?
Btw, the Bogeyman apparently comes from British sailors saying to watch out for the Boogies, or rather the Bugis, a people-group that still exists in modern Indonesia which, at that time, had a lot of pirates near their home territory. That apparently turned into 'the bogeyman' or 'boogeyman'. These aren't ape-people. I met one girl who was Bugis who was quite attractive, with no ape-like features or visible body hair at all.
This is another example of fear of just regular people turning into the idea of a monster. It must have been scarey to be attacked by pirates, but the individual 5-foot-tall Indonesian man isn't all that scary in real life outside of the pirating situation.
If I took your DNA today I cannot tell what you would look like, no one is remotely close to being able to do this today. This happened to be a topic of discussion today at our microbiology lab. We could find your hair color, eye color, race and many specific general characteristics but would still have no idea what you look like. An extinct hominid separated by 600,000 years, we would have no clue.
This is one of those pop-news kind of online articles about the topic.
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/071025 ... 7.197.html
The idea is Neanderthal predation (the 70,000 year war with the Neanderthal) drove human evolution for 70,000 years. There are some SJW influenced biases in anthropology like tribal people were very peaceful, all evidence points to the opposite. An exception would be the San People of Botswana which are an island of ancient humans, there are very different from other Africans.
The idea that the San are a prototype for ancient humans seems like wild guesswork to me. What are the rest of the genetic expressions of man-kind? Chopped liver? Neanderthals were humans, too. So were Cromagnon people. Humans just used to have more diverse characteristics.
Anthropology is full of post modernist just like women studies. You cannot trust they will follow the scientific method, often ideology is the guiding theme over science. They adhere to pseudoscience proven to be positively untrue like men and women are the same and the different races are the same. They try to extend this to different species like Neanderthals. Its a very corrupt field.
I haven't read a lot of antro stuff, but it seems like they can use really small sample sizes, and it's kind of like some branches of sociology in that it gets into abstract theories and concepts that aren't really testable. There is lots of 'bla bla bla' and not a lot of testable propositions. At least some of the other social sciences like psychology can be tested in some way, but there are plenty of ideologues in those fields as well.
Evolutionary psychology seems to me to be a speculative psuedoscience to me as well, more like a kind of 'logic' for reasoning. It can also be kind of teolological, which it is not supposed to be.
