rationalskepticism.org

pinkharrier wrote:Hmmmm. Anyone disagree? Tiel? Lyingcheat? Galaxian? No social constructing for H.nea?

I don’t disagree but I also don’t formally agree at most I would agree by default.

Why?

Well in one hand we have very interesting data about the anatomy of Neanderthal man. We know that this man had remarkably distinct features such as his skull, his strength and perhaps even his growth. We even have today a part of Neanderthal genome and know there were probably interbreeding between Neanderthal and some modern humans.

In the other hand we have no complete data about genetic diversity and population structure of various Nanderthal populations and so no enough data to compare those population structures with those of modern humans who were contemporaneous to Neanderthal.

Did Neanderthal and modern human form a cline? Perhaps but were not sure, were the situation of modern human and Neanderthal analogous to the situation of brown bear and polar bear? That’s a possibility but again we’re not sure. However consideromg some important morphological difference and more phylogenetically distant compared to modern human populations we place Neanderthal in a different taxonomic unit, sometimes as a different species and sometimes just as another subspecies of Homo sapiens.

pinkharrier wrote:Oh, and Tiel, there is a good reason to undo your changed Galaxian quote. It is called being gracious. Do you know the word (BTW your English is pretty damn good)?

My english is not perfect at all so I have a little excuse.

So perhaps I was not particularly gracious but it will certainly be exagerate to say I was dishonest (seriously only one litte post between his and mine) or nasty.

And so nothing serious, I understand the moderator the essential point being that somebody has understood the point behind the picture with Danny De Vito.

Galaxian wrote: Now, we learn (as you & me always knew, since it is common sense) that up to 4% of European & Mid Eastern genes are Neanderthal.

And we found this “Neanderthal contribution” among East-Asian and Papuans in fact probably in all non-african populations (not in concordance with traditional racial classifications).

Galaxian wrote:So the coupling produced fertile hybrids. There is no neanderthal content in native sub-Saharan genes.

That’s not a certitude at all considering the small sample that was use to detect some “Neanderthal contribution” among subsharian africans, in fact the contribution is perhaps simply uncommon but not totally absent.

Galaxian wrote:Making a mockery of "mosaic" theories of human genetics.

No you just give a good reason to making a mockery of you!

The term “mosaic” doesn’t mean that we have to find absolutely every allele in every human population. But even considering the last point we can verify the mosaic character of human diversity when we see alleles or haplogroups (and so traces of maternal or paternal extra-continental contributions) who are common outside of Africa but curiously also common in some subsaharian populations and uncommon in others.

In fact this type of “mixtures” seems in fact to be more common in recent human evolutionary history that we commonly think (remember this recent paper).