Art, according to the reports, Humans and Neanderthals became divergent at least some 500,000 to 750,000 years ago.  Neanderthal appear to be a species restricted primarily to Europe.  Archeologist and anthropologist believe that they were lacking in tools and speech.  What tools they posed appear to be taken from humans, sites lacking in evidence that they actually used the tools.  Whether they were having "relations" is speculative.  What does appear to be from the DNA evidence is they were not having offspring.

Change is constant, and the further we get away from the last ice age the warmer it will get too... regardless of the Homo sapiens (we just know how to speed it along).  ... and someday perhaps if you can get hogs to eat enough birds... perhaps pigs could fly.

Les
PS - I heard the entire Ohio State Team bought tickets to watch the Rose Bowl!  So yes they are going...

-----Original Message-----
From: Conchologists List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 9:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CONCH-L] Two species becoming one

OK! OK!  But a few inane questions---:   1. Did Neanderthal and Sapiens descend from a common ancester sometime back?  2. Did pockets of Neander continue being and perhaps still exist in some places?  (You haven't met my mother-in-law, have you?)  3. Why did the Neanders disappear? 4. Could the income tax have had anything to do with it? 5. Are all humans interbreedable? 6. Given enough time and isolation, could present pockets of Sapiens change biologically? 7. Will Ohio State go to the Rose Bowl?
Art

---- Don <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Obviously, these people never met my old boss !

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leslie Allen Crnkovic" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 7:04 PM
Subject: [CONCH-L] Two species becoming one

Andrew... Neanderthal is not mergent with Humans but a divergent dead-end hominid line.  Les

"Latest Genetic Evidence Indicates No Interbreeding between
Neanderthals & Humans" (Science, 18 May 2007, p 967)
        At the Biology of Genomes meeting held recently at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, scientific teams from the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California reported on the first-ever Neanderthal nuclear DNA sequences. ... In a sharp contrast to the evolutionary scenario proposed by University of Chicago researchers.  Through a direct analysis of the nuclear DNA sequences of the Neanderthal genome, researchers from Harvard University and the National Human Genome Research Institute conclusively discovered no indication whatsoever that humans and Neanderthals interbred.  Analysis of human and Neanderthal Y-chromosome sequences by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, produced no evidence for gene flow between humans and Neanderthals.  Earlier studies of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA yielded a similar conclusion as well.  Direct comparisons between Neanderthal DNA indicate that these two species did not interbreed.

OTHER REFs:
> Matthias Krings et al., "Neanderthal DNA Sequences and the Origin of Modern Humans," Cell 90 (1997): 19-30; Matthias > > Krings et al., "DNA Sequence of the Mitochondrial Hypervariable Region II from the Neanderthal Type Specimen," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 96 (1999): 5581-85;
> Igor V. Ovchinnikov et al., "Molecular Analysis of Neanderthal DNA from the Northern Caucasus," Nature 404 (2000): 490-93;
> Matthias Krings et al., "A View of Neanderthal Genetic Diversity," Nature Genetics 26 (2000): 144-46.
> Ralf W. Schmitz et al., "The Neanderthal Type Site Revisited: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Skeletal Remains from the Neander Valley, Germany," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 99 (2002): 13342-47.

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