Talk:Neanderthal

Requested move at talk:Neanderthal extinction hypotheses

There's a move discussion for Neanderthal extinction hypotheses → Neanderthal extinction, where I'd like to have more input. --Cold Season (talk) 00:15, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

• As per my comment there, I propose retitling the section Neanderthal#Extinction_hypotheses to Neanderthal#Extinction. The hypotheses are material within the subject of their extinction. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:20, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Neanderthals=Humans

There is no proof that they're not one and the same thing... "Humans" mated with "Neanderthals", so... 129.180.152.199 (talk) 13:10, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm not happy that the words "differ" in this article, relate only to 0.12% of our DNA (which in the case between races, is the case...). And the only other thing being that they had a "more robust build", and "distinctive morphological features", because - that's what people can say about differences between races too... 129.180.152.199 (talk) 13:13, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

What's worse is this quote already in the article, "scientists have debated whether Neanderthals should be classified as ...Homo sapiens neanderthalensis... placing Neanderthals as a subspecies of H. sapiens", providing 2 references. The only evidence however, showing it as a separate species is "some morphological studies", "no cultural interaction", and "mitochondrial DNA studies has been interpreted as evidence... were not a subspecies". This could also be a racially discriminating arguments against blacks. For example, they have (1) a different morphological facial structure; (2) they do not interact culturally with white people; and (3) their mitochondrial DNA, i.e. the DNA of their mother, is not the same, i.e. blacks and whites do not share the same mommy. Are you serious this is where our most up to date "science" is??? 134.148.67.15 (talk) 10:24, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Neanderthals in Europe died out thousands of years earlier

1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.15.254.104 (talk) 03:01, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Neanderthal

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Neanderthal's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "nytimes.com":

• From MSNBC: Stelter, Brian (2008-09-07). "MSNBC Takes Incendiary Hosts From Anchor Seat". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-09-30.
• From Ukraine: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/world/europe/activists-say-election-of-a-president-is-just-a-start-in-repairing-ukraine.html?_r=0
• From History of Italy: "Fossil Teeth Put Humans in Europe Earlier Than Thought". The New York Times. 2 November 2011.
• From Italy: Kiefer, Peter (22 October 2007). "Mafia crime is 7% of GDP in Italy, group reports". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 April 2011.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 19:43, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Extinct species?

"Genetic evidence published in 2010 suggests that Neanderthals contributed to the DNA of anatomically modern humans, probably through interbreeding".

In that case, how can they be a distinct species? My understanding is that if individuals can interbreed and the offspring are fertile, they're of the same species by definition. Paul Magnussen (talk)

That is not correct. Lions and tigers can interbreed and produce fertile offspring (ligers and tigons), but they are separate species. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:04, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Refer to the species problem. Kortoso (talk) 16:51, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Exactly, there is no fully satisfactory definition of "species". But Paul Magnussen is nonetheless mostly correct in suggesting that evidence of interbreeding goes a long way to support the view that Neanderthals are not a separate species.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 17:08, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Maunus: No it doesn't. Scientists don't strictly follow the biological species concept. The coyotes owes about 10% of its genome to the grey wolf, but biologists are not taking away that species boundary. If you look at the post-Neanderthal genome research, you will notice that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis basically never shows up (except amongst remnant multiregionalists). Scientists have not been referring to Neanderthals as Homo sapiens. That is what is relevant for Wikipedia.

• Google scholar hits since 2010 for "Homo neanderthalensis" -"Homo sapiens neanderthalensis" [1] - About 1,710 results
• Google scholar hits since 2010 for -"Homo neanderthalensis" "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis" [2] - About 294 results
• Google scholar hits since 2010 for "Homo neanderthalensis" AND "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis" [3] - About 117 results

We have our answer here about what is being used in the literature, and it is not the subspecies classification. Thegreyanomaly (talk) 16:59, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

It is just a matter of opinion, all taxonomic ranks are arbitrary (standards differ wildly across fields), which also creates the "human races" problem. We'll just have to follow what the majority of sources say. Only safe thing is unranked clades, and even that leaves hybridisation ambiguous. FunkMonk (talk) 17:22, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

The paleoanthropologists I've been following (c.f. John Hawkes) won't even call Neandertal a species or subspecies. I think the preferred wiggle-word is "population". Kortoso (talk) 18:37, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

John Hawks is partly or is influenced by multiregionalism. His adviser (Milford Wolpoff) is the most pre-eminent (and wrong) multiregionalists on the planet. The anthropological consensus (albeit with some dissenters) is that they are a separate species; the Google scholar hit counts clearly convey this. (Also, this is a bit semantic, but JH is not quite a paleoanthropolgist; he has background in paleoanthropology, but his research is primarily in molecular anthropology) Thegreyanomaly (talk) 21:42, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree that Hawks may not be the best source of an "objective source" because of his association with multiregionalism, but on the other hand I don't think that it is currently clear whether the separate species consensus has been maintained following the most recent developments. The textbooks I have used seem to almost avoid the issue. I don't think we can really say that there is a consensus either way currently.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 22:06, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

You are very wrong on the consensus issue. Google scholar hits are the clearest way to tell (and are regularly used Wikipedia to gauge scholarly consensus), and people are publishing "Homo neanderthalensis" decidedly more than " "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis"". To ignore that would violate WP:UNDUE. Thegreyanomaly (talk) 22:19, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't think that is the necessary conclusion from you google based research. First of all google scholar will be slow to register a change in consensus because most of the hits are citations of or repetitions of the usage of older sources. Only specialist literature should be counted and the context should be taken into account. A usage that simply repeats earlier usage without evaluate it does not demonstrate or contribute to scholarly consensus. Secondly, your research is based only on two options and does not include the possibility of agnosticism, which I consider to be the most prevalent view in current paleoanthropological literature. Only a handful of scholars are actually invested in the classification of Neanderthals as either species or subspecies, in my experience most scholars consider it a mostly futile and irrelevant argument because they are aware of the arbitrariness of taxonomy. User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 22:31, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Wrong. Google Scholar is actively updated. New article regularly end up in its search history. Google scholar only presents scholarly books and articles. You can even filter out books if you want to by adding in "-site:books.google.com". You can change the start date from 2010 to 2011/12/13 and the exact same trend continues. Very few people actively state that the Neanderthals are subspecies. They are trounced by the number of people who treat them as a species. You are jumping in WP:OR and WP:Synthesis by trying to jump into agnosticism and interpretation of what the ambiguity means. Rejecting articles because you thinkg that "[a] usage that simply repeats earlier usage without evaluate it does not demonstrate or contribute to scholarly consensus." is invalid. Those scholars (i.e., those reliable sources) used the notation they used, you can't make a story to take away that from the count. Essentially that's like saying that every scientist that publishes an article that cites research in agreement saying climate change is occurring does not count to consensus of scientists who say it is occurring.

I am sorry, but pretending these numbers don't exist violates WP:UNDUE by giving a minority view too much weight. Thegreyanomaly (talk) 22:48, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Europeans and others are partly Neanderthal.

New article just off the oven stating that most European groups have 2.5 percent Neanderthal genes:

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/10/10/results-from-asturias-spain-add-to-the-genographic-project-human-family-tree

From there, the following is cut and pasted:

Among the 100 people who participated, most (>80%) of their maternal lineages belonged to one of the seven major European haplogroups (branches on the human family tree). Lineages from the Middle East and North Africa were also present, but in smaller numbers (between 5 and 10% each), and one participant had Native American maternal ancestry, not commonly found among the Spanish.

Maternal haplogroup H was the most common branch among participants, accounting for more than a third of lineages. Interestingly, the ancestral haplogroup HV, with ties to early agriculturalists from the Middle East or possibly Europe’s earliest settlers, was found in eleven Asturians present. Overall, the maternal results showed a high frequency of some of Europe’s oldest lineages, a pattern similar to their Basque neighbors, also from northern Spain.

Haplogroup R1b was the reoccurring lineage for paternal ancestry, accounting for nearly 75% of male participants in this group. R1b is the most common European Y-chromosome branch, and nearly 60% of European men carry this lineage. One interesting finding revealed, however, was that many of the men came from lesser known branches of the R1b, suggesting their exact origin remains a mystery. Among the paternal lineages only one had ties to Europe’s fist modern humans.

Before modern humans arrived in Iberia about 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals ruled Spain. And although most anthropologists agree that humans and Neanderthals mixed, a point of interest among the participants was the unusually low percentage of Neanderthal in their DNA. The people from Asturias on average carried only 1.5% Neanderthal DNA, compared to the 2.5% average observed among most other modern European groups.

National Geographic’s roots in Asturias go deeper than DNA. In 2006, it was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication in 2006 for its efforts to inspire people to care about the planet. To learn more about National Geographic’s Genographic Project and discover your own ancient ancestry, visit www.genographic.com

Pipo. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.73.133.221 (talk) 23:02, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Not new. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project

-Kortoso (talk) 23:07, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Some popular news article (not saying this is reliable) are suggesting that Westerners/Europeans became smarter because they intermarried with the Neanderthals, whereas the Blacks remained less intelligent because they failed to intermarry outside of Africa 134.148.67.15 (talk) 10:37, 17 October 2014 (UTC)