Well, maybe . . .
A 100,000-Year-Old Civilisation? | Features | Fortean Times
Now, the Fortean Times is perhaps not the best place to look for dependable data on ancient humanity (or anything else of any relevance to the real world, for that matter). But this story reminded me of something.
Neandethal man died out -- or otherwise disappeared from the Earth -- about the time that anatomically modern humans first appeared in Europe. Neanderthals -- whose scientific binomial designation is Homo sapiens neanderthalis, as distinguished from Homo sapiens sapiens, the scientific name for modern humanity and, presumably, Cro-Magnon man; the two are considered to be subspecies of the same species, Homo sapiens -- are assumed by many researchers to have been unable to interbreed successfully, no offspring, or sterile offspring, being the only fruits of such unions.
Yet native Australians, who settled Australia at sometime between 125,000 and 40,000 years ago, depending on which researchers you ask, have intermarried numerous times with white Australians, and such unions have frequently proved fertile, producing children who, in turn, were capable of having children of their own.
Question: Why is it that two peoples, the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, who co-inhabited Europe, couldn't have had children together, children capable themselves of having children, whereas people descended from Cro-Magnon and a people who came from a much earlier lineage, the Australian aborigines, can and frequently do? Or can they?
I'm not sure why researchers believe Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon weren't interfertile, or that at most their unions only produced mules, or that Cro-Magnon genes had a strong competitive edge over Neanderthal genes. I do know that the narrator of the Discovery Channel series on Neanderthals consistently referred to Neanderthals in terms more applicable to describing farm animals, using phrases such as "dominant male" instead of "headman" or "leader" for the man heading up a Neanderthal clan, dehumanizing them and making them seem as if they weren't related to us at all. Which says a good deal more about the Discovery Channel than anything else, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons included. But that really has no bearing on what anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered about Neanderthals, which is what I don't have enough information on to assess the problem.
At any rate, above is the link to the Fortean Times article. Enjoy.
Now, the Fortean Times is perhaps not the best place to look for dependable data on ancient humanity (or anything else of any relevance to the real world, for that matter). But this story reminded me of something.
Neandethal man died out -- or otherwise disappeared from the Earth -- about the time that anatomically modern humans first appeared in Europe. Neanderthals -- whose scientific binomial designation is Homo sapiens neanderthalis, as distinguished from Homo sapiens sapiens, the scientific name for modern humanity and, presumably, Cro-Magnon man; the two are considered to be subspecies of the same species, Homo sapiens -- are assumed by many researchers to have been unable to interbreed successfully, no offspring, or sterile offspring, being the only fruits of such unions.
Yet native Australians, who settled Australia at sometime between 125,000 and 40,000 years ago, depending on which researchers you ask, have intermarried numerous times with white Australians, and such unions have frequently proved fertile, producing children who, in turn, were capable of having children of their own.
Question: Why is it that two peoples, the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, who co-inhabited Europe, couldn't have had children together, children capable themselves of having children, whereas people descended from Cro-Magnon and a people who came from a much earlier lineage, the Australian aborigines, can and frequently do? Or can they?
I'm not sure why researchers believe Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon weren't interfertile, or that at most their unions only produced mules, or that Cro-Magnon genes had a strong competitive edge over Neanderthal genes. I do know that the narrator of the Discovery Channel series on Neanderthals consistently referred to Neanderthals in terms more applicable to describing farm animals, using phrases such as "dominant male" instead of "headman" or "leader" for the man heading up a Neanderthal clan, dehumanizing them and making them seem as if they weren't related to us at all. Which says a good deal more about the Discovery Channel than anything else, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons included. But that really has no bearing on what anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered about Neanderthals, which is what I don't have enough information on to assess the problem.
At any rate, above is the link to the Fortean Times article. Enjoy.