Neandrathals

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sfs

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Melethiel said:
(nitpick) It's spelled "Neanderthal."
Either "Neanderthal" or "Neandertal", with the latter being more common these days.

Note: Neanderthals were named after the Neander Valley ("Neander Thal" as it was then spelled in German), which in turn was named after Joachim Neander, the German minister and hymn writer, still known for "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty", among others.
 
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gluadys

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AnomalousSilence said:
What would lead you to believe that?

Or, as my mom brought up, since they are ape and human like, perhaps they were more of an animal?

Actually, your mom is wrong. Neanderthals are no more or less ape-like than we are. We are both part of the great ape family Hominidae, genus Homo.

In fact, it was thought, until recently, that we and Neanderthals might be the same species, but a comparison of mitochondrial DNA indicates that is not likely true. However, we are certainly close cousins.

Oh, and since we are animals, I don't see how Neanderthals could be "more animal" than us either.
 
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jereth

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AnomalousSilence said:
How does a YEC explain Neandrathals? There is TONS of evidence - even bones and skulls proving their existence.

AiG teaches that Neanderthals and Homo erectus were descendants of Adam and lived in the last 6000 years.

Not sure about other creationist organisations.
 
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shernren

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There's hyperevolution right in the Homo genus. I wonder if Mark will tell AiG how mistaken they are to imagine the descendance of Homo erectus and Neanderthals from Adam in under 6,000 years?

Given that he will probably never accept humans diverging from chimps in 5 million years, he should say that it would require a miracle for erectus and Neanderthals to be descended from Adam in 6,000!

Then again, YECism is already chock-full of meaningless miracles. One more really wouldn't make much difference.
 
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rmwilliamsll

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Then again, YECism is already chock-full of meaningless miracles. One more really wouldn't make much difference.


I think that this is actually a big deal.
YECists wish to make miracles and God's supernatural overruling of the Creation's normal ways of operating the way to demonstrate both God's existence and His great power.

It as if God needs to continually demonstrate His power by signs, wonders and miracles.

Yet if i understand the context of miracles in the New Testament, they are given to substantiate who Jesus was and furthermore miracles have to be given both a context and a verbal explanation in order for us to understand them.

I can certainly understand this YECist desire to point people to a miraculuous creation and say: "see God is at work, things are not as they always were, God intervenes directly in His creation". But in the context of miracles in the NT i see no reason to be so confident that God actually works that way. But rather God seems content to work providential, invisibly, underneath the normal ways without this great eruption of power represented by miracles.

I'd further point to the whole history of the church and the way God works through simple means and people, He really doesn't do this divine skywriting that YECist creationism seems to point at.

that is one reason i like the term "providential evolutionist"
 
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DamonWV

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AnomalousSilence said:
How does a YEC explain Neandrathals? There is TONS of evidence - even bones and skulls proving their existence.

How many neanderthal models do we have total ? i know a few of the past were disproved, like one was a complete model made of some ape man that they specualted from just a tooth found, turned out that the tooth was a pig tooth.
I am always cautious with these fossils they find. I reject any model that is made where someone starts their presumptions of some ape man half man half ape , from say 1 tiny bone found.
Im not denying , nor saying there are no complete remains that have been found. I know there are complete sets, but my question is . how many complete Neanderthals have they found ?

Reason why I say this is if they have only found a few, or even if it was 100 .. Couldnt it be possible that the 100 complete fossils out of how many billions of other fossils , could have been people who were " freaks of nature " ?
I dont mean freak in a bad way, just stating like people who devoloped some form of bone disorders, or so many other types of disorders and diseases that could drastically change formation of bone structure.
how many 8 foot people we have walking around ? not many, how many dwarfs or midgets ? Small percent compared to the world population. But if you didnt know there was such things as midgets , dwarfs, or extremely tall people, then you would automatically assume that these variations of fossils coudl had been some ancestor we evolved from.
SO does any one know exaclt how many complete or mostly complete bone fossil neanderthals have been found ?
 
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gluadys

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DamonWV said:
How many neanderthal models do we have total ? i know a few of the past were disproved, like one was a complete model made of some ape man that they specualted from just a tooth found, turned out that the tooth was a pig tooth.


This is a good example of how rumour distorts a story. A fossil tooth was found, and it was suggested that it might be a human tooth (not a neandertal tooth). It was sent to a university for study. Meanwhile a journalist (not a scientist) wrote a sensationalized story about "Nebraska man" and had an artist friend draw up an illustration for it.

Several months later, at the university, where scientists, not journalists, studied the tooth, it was identified as a peccary tooth. A peccary is a sort of pig.

No complete model was ever made, only the artist's drawing made for the newspaper's sensational story.


I am always cautious with these fossils they find. I reject any model that is made where someone starts their presumptions of some ape man half man half ape , from say 1 tiny bone found.

Did you know that it was a creationist who perfected the art of reconstructing a complete skeleton from a single bone? His name was Baron Georges Cuvier. You might like to look him up. He should be one of your heroes.

Im not denying , nor saying there are no complete remains that have been found. I know there are complete sets, but my question is . how many complete Neanderthals have they found ?

This is a pretty complete account of all Neanderthal fossils found.


http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html#neandertals

Reason why I say this is if they have only found a few, or even if it was 100 .. Couldnt it be possible that the 100 complete fossils out of how many billions of other fossils , could have been people who were " freaks of nature " ?


That is a possibility with a single find, but the chances of 100 or more all being "freaks" while no normal specimens are found is astronomically small. Because normal people are much more common than abnormal people many more normal people will be fossilized than abnormal people. So it is most likely that any fossil speciman found will be normal for the species.

Think of it this way: suppose you have a jar filled with a thousand orange jelly beans and scattered among them are 10 black jellybeans. If you are blindfolded and draw out a jelly bean ten times, what are the odds that every time you will draw one of the black ones? Small as those odds are, the probability of all Neandertal fossils being freaks of nature is much smaller still.
 
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DamonWV

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gluadys said:
This is a good example of how rumour distorts a story. A fossil tooth was found, and it was suggested that it might be a human tooth (not a neandertal tooth). It was sent to a university for study. Meanwhile a journalist (not a scientist) wrote a sensationalized story about "Nebraska man" and had an artist friend draw up an illustration for it.

Several months later, at the university, where scientists, not journalists, studied the tooth, it was identified as a peccary tooth. A peccary is a sort of pig.

No complete model was ever made, only the artist's drawing made for the newspaper's sensational story.




Did you know that it was a creationist who perfected the art of reconstructing a complete skeleton from a single bone? His name was Baron Georges Cuvier. You might like to look him up. He should be one of your heroes.



This is a pretty complete account of all Neanderthal fossils found.


http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html#neandertals




That is a possibility with a single find, but the chances of 100 or more all being "freaks" while no normal specimens are found is astronomically small. Because normal people are much more common than abnormal people many more normal people will be fossilized than abnormal people. So it is most likely that any fossil speciman found will be normal for the species.

Think of it this way: suppose you have a jar filled with a thousand orange jelly beans and scattered among them are 10 black jellybeans. If you are blindfolded and draw out a jelly bean ten times, what are the odds that every time you will draw one of the black ones? Small as those odds are, the probability of all Neandertal fossils being freaks of nature is much smaller still.
The whole freaks of nature was one of my thoughts. I mean we see people with many bone disorders today and its a normal thing to view, but if we seen fossils from the past that had the same thing, i was thinking that we could have made a mistake in distinguishing what the find really was. I see your point of view about picking the jelly beans. My point is more along the lines of us just mis interpreting some genetic flaw that made a person look different that what we consider normal.
If we had evolved from neanderthals I would expect to see hundreds of thousands of complete fossils of neanderthals and then transitional fossils that slowly developed over time to what we view today as normal human.
 
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gluadys

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DamonWV said:
The whole freaks of nature was one of my thoughts. I mean we see people with many bone disorders today and its a normal thing to view, but if we seen fossils from the past that had the same thing, i was thinking that we could have made a mistake in distinguishing what the find really was. I see your point of view about picking the jelly beans. My point is more along the lines of us just mis interpreting some genetic flaw that made a person look different that what we consider normal.

OK. It's not a bad idea. Just not a correct one.


If we had evolved from neanderthals I would expect to see hundreds of thousands of complete fossils of neanderthals and then transitional fossils that slowly developed over time to what we view today as normal human.

We didn't evolve from Neanderthals. In fact, at times humans and Neanderthals lived near each other.

We did have a common ancestor though--probably Homo erectus. Think of Neanderthals as evolutionary cousins who have the same great-great-grandfather as us.

Have you ever explored the Tree of Life Project?

It's good for keeping the various lineages straight, just as on a family tree. You know who is a direct ancestor, who is on a collateral line, and who is in which generation.

A great book with lots more detail is The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.
 
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