Comments on: Flaming Neandertals and Future Humans

By: DWA

DWA — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 15:14:18 +0000

It would probably be appropriate in this connection to remember that futurists of the ’60s saw computers ushering in a totally paperless society and a thirty-hour work week.

By: Jeremy_Wells

Jeremy_Wells — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:07:06 +0000

My only problem with this is that the author of the study references “plastic surgery” and “body modification” giving us a homogenous appearance. If this is the case, then aside from economic factors which may make modification preventive, people with genetically “ugly” features will continue to pass those features to their children and, as always, those “beautiful” people from the less wealthy classes will continue to comingle their genes with genetically “ugly”, but body modified, elites for many, many years. What happens in that supposed ten thousand years needed for this break to happen, then, would seem to have as much to do with our sociological development over that time as it does with our physical development (i.e. if plastic surgery becomes cheap and common enough for anyone to engage in body modification, the whole theory goes out the window).

By: sschaper

sschaper — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:29:47 +0000

The Neandertal coloration in Europeans (who were central north Asians previously) isn’t found in all northern peoples - such as the Saami, Samoyeds, Innuit, Dorset and so forth. I suspected that our coloring came from the Neandertals, however this new finding is of a different mutation in the same gene, producing the same result (has an adequate survey been done of all fair-haired and blue and green eyed people to rule out any connection? Or is the absolute conclusion product over the continuing debate over whether the Neandertals, with bigger brains, sewing tools, bone flutes and burial rituals were more human or more animal?)

Allan, I’m more inclined to think that it was “trolls” and “elves” rather than blacks and whites.

By: elsanto

elsanto — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 03:53:09 +0000

With that description, is it any wonder that several aspects of Curry’s thinking sound so much like Philippe Rushton on steroids? We should be less worried about the selection of phenotypes, and more worried about the prevlance of idiots in the world who are reproducing at an unprecedented rate — most of them in the “elite” to which this article from the Daily Mail (a paper which I would not grace with the floor of my parakeet cage) refers.

Just my two cents.

By: Allen Hazen

Allen Hazen — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 02:35:01 +0000

The idea that Neandertals were blond and light-skinned has been around for a while: they had, after all, been evolving for a long time in the part of the world now inhabited by people of that coloration, so if pigment has anything to do with amount of sunlight…
Bjorn Kurten (Swedish Finnish paleontologist: I think some of his books, like “The Age of Mammals,” may still be available, and if you can find it his “The Cave Bear Story,” with each chapter describing a new way of using the fossil evidence to try to answer a different question, is a really great introduction to why paleontology is a science and not just “stamp-collecting”) wrote two novels about Neandertal/Cro-Magon interaction: “Dance of the Tiger” and a sequle, “Singletusk.” (In corporating ideas he thought were plausible, but maybe too speculative to try to publish in a journal…) One think that I’m sure he enjoyed immensely was having the Neandertals and the ancestors of modern Europeans call each other “blacks” and “whites.” Fun books.