Neanderthal Males Had Popeye-Like Arms

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How can one make generalizations about an entire species from one fossil remain? That doesn't seem very scientific to me.

hm, that could be possible...I guess..
It would fit in with the theory that the Neanderthals died out because they required a higher amount of calories than homo sapiens. Muscles need a lot more calories.
But yeah, you can't tell if its genetics or not based on that... Maybe he was just a really horny bachelor, with too much time on his hands...

maybe they just w@nked a whole bunch more? has anyone considered that?

Now children. Neanderthal was doing whatever long before the incest that produced Sapiens, and they took till 50,000 years ago to learn to throw a spear. Everyone called them a bunch of wussies, for real men were contact hunters, charging in and stabbing, knocking the game down, and beating it to death!

A while before the spear stabbers were called wusses by the "I beat it to death with a rock." hunters.

Neanderthal lived and hunted like wolves, they moved often, and hunted as a pack, women and children driving the game slowly toward the hunters, and they did not bother with cooking, kill it and dinner is ready.

A diet of warm raw meat would account for a lot, and a strong right arm would help, for sticking a spear in something is only the start, they do not just drop dead. Then comes butchering with the aid of a rock, befor the big cats come to the kill.

Even working in a group, four, hundred pound men taking on a bison, 1,000 pounds, was not a sure thing, and mammoth, at 16,000 pounds and in herds, were out of the question.

So, what do you do? I kill things ten times my size with a pointed stick, then eat them.

Some people in Africa have been known to eat thirty to forty pounds of raw meat. It does not store long, it does attract lions, and for the usual group of eight to twelve, a thousand pound animal would be three days of eating.

As it was not a good place to hang around, blood everywhere, a pile of guts, they would feed and quarter the animal, and drag away the quarters. A hundred pound man dragging a several hundred pound hindquarter, getting ten miles from the kill site by dark. The whole group was packing as much as they could carry.

This will develop strong bones, great upper body, and a big right arm.

They also did nothing else, getting a hundred pounds of meat a day for your group was a full time job.

The best hunters also got the best sex, the worst hunters got left for the lions, so lots of sex is needed to keep such a system going.

I think Maria Mednikova dreams of life as a cave girl with ultra macho pumped killers coming in with huge amounts of meat, full bellies, and wanting to grab her tender cave meat. Short spear practice!

The Tarahumara indians of northern Mexico can run anything into the ground. 500 years of Spain, they do not speak Spanish, and wear their own clothes.

Besides running deer to death, they have a ball game, where the goal posts are several hundred miles apart. Besides running a deer to death, they throw it over their shoulders, and run home.

All of their children are named Son, or Daughter.

They also have highly developed crafts, are talented weavers, and have a complex social order.

They are a good model of a pre metals people, smart, strong, talented, complex world view, and know they are right and Mexico is just a lesser tribe.

As far as known, they have been there for over 10,000 years.

Working cultures persist.

Er, wow, this is actually my field, well sort of. I am going for physical anthropology, and although I suck at anatomy, I can tell you how awesome the field of Forensic Anthropology is. It's actually the study of bones and you can derive a person's whole life story just from bones. For instance, this guy allegedly had a serious right arm. They can tell this by looking at the muscle insertions, such as the deltoid tuberosity, to see if it is beefier than others. If the deltoid tuberosity is larger and knubbier, then that means that the muscle also had to be huge. The more built up the landmarks of your skeleton, the heavier the muscle mass.

You can also tell the diet, the health, gender, and biological age of the body by looking at it. Sure, you won't be able to see if it had stomach ulcers, but many diseases leave their mark on the skeleton. You could look at the growth lines. Bone stops forming to give the rest of the body energy when fighting off diseases. Vitamin deficiencies leave irregularities on the bone, as well, such as tiny little holes, whose scientific name I forget. Arthritis and tuberlulosis can leave huge marks. One form of tuberculosis melts down your spine. One photo from our lab showed him bent at a 90 degree angle from it. Quite serious. It was healed up and he was old, so somehow he survived, at least for a little while.

From the shape of the bones, you can tell male or female. Also, female's bones are less beefy than males. Simply less muscle, although there are exceptions to this. Also the skeleton might be shorter. The hips and skulls are different. You can measure height with a femur. Age has to do with how your bones solidify. The epiphyses, on the cap ends of your long bones, attach to the metaphysis, the long part of the bone, at different ages. You compare this to the dentition, if possible, to get a good idea on age. It's not exact, but it works. Some weirdos out there have a remarkably old or young biological age as compared to their chronological age. You also look at the sutures of the skull. Oldies will have less sutures. They take longer to close, except for your metopic suture, which runs down your frontal lobe, which fuses at age 6. Though, it can persist throughout life. It's necessary for birth.

As for the hunting thing, their shoulder range of mobility was less than that of ours, but still more advanced than its predecessors. They wouldn't naturally be able to play baseball, simply due to the limitations of their skeleton.

If you can get a bunch of bones together, you can statistically derive some information. I don't know how many skeletons they have.

Their diet consisted mostly of meat. Protein is great for muscle building. Tell diet by carbons. Here is a great website that knows more than I know.
Forensic Diet and Dentition
I forgot how much I loved this subject. Hehe.

A couple science magazines (I'm kicking myself for not recalling their titles) have articles about how the Neanderthal genome has been decoded in Germany. Guess what - despite being archaic homo sapiens, they were still close enough to us that they were absorbed into our population, and have seemingly disappeared into our gene pools. Both articles maintained Non- African populations possess two to four percent Neanderthal genes. Not enough to influence our modern human appearance - which is too bad, because I'd love having that muscle mass - but it is definitely there. It's thought remnants of other archaic homo sapiens probably were absorbed into our population, as well. After years of documentaries and articles describing Neanderthals as inferior competition who couldn't cut it once us modern humans showed up, I'm happy to know something of them lives on in us.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The Max Planck Instititute published in Nature. Time did an article recently.

For those out of Africa, some northern Europeans, and all of the Han Chinese, which is 93%, a Neanderthal father line.

So the breeds number over a billion.

We will have to reconstruct the past, for Chavet Cave, recently discovered, after 40,000 years, great painting, and done before Sapians reached the area. No southern area or earlier era, do Sapians show painting, but it is also found in the Ural Mountains, long a Neanderthal home, where Sapians came very late.

Neanderthal sites have yeilded pigments ground to a power, kept in shells, a large production, which have been called cosmetics. Neanderthal did bury their dead, and painted them red. Nothing like that from Sapians.

It seems in the arts and sciences, telling time, we have to look for a Neanderthal elder brother.

Much that has been claimed for the new Sapians, is only found in what was long Neanderthal homeland, and not in the southern Sapians at all.

The 4% DNA differance is huge, it says the Sapian father line was replaced, yet there are none who have the Neanderthal mother line, for no Sapian was man enough for those women. None survived Snuss snuss.

Forgive me if this question has been answered before, but is there any theory on why Neanderthals did not use distance hunting techniques? Was the distance hunting less efficient for acquiring calories?