Neanderthal theory of Autism and occipital bun

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Nobody in my family have any of those bumps, and we have 4 - 5 aspies. I actually have a slight dent there. I do like to wear my long hair twisted into a bun over there. We also have rather light bones and slender build. So, nothing like neanderthal at all.

Yes -some folks have long skulls and some have short. The long headedness of long headed modern people really isnt really related to that of the neanderthals because the Neanderthals needed the bulge at the back of the skull to balance thier heavier jaws.

Autism appears amongst African populations even in Africa just as it appears anywhere else. Since modern Africans are the only people who never mixed with Neanderthals autism can't have been a special feature unique to Homo neanderthalensis who evolved outside Africa. Instead if there is a link between Homo neanderthalensis and autism then it was still something that left Africa anyway with an earlier hominid and was passed on until it reached neanderthalensis through intermediate forms.
Given that primatologists think they've spotted autism in Teco the bonobo there may be cause to support the idea that autism has long been around in Africa amongst primates including us.

That's the most stupid suggestion I've ever heard.

The Neanderthals naturally had the bulge because they had some over-developped brain function in that area, which is the visual processing area. It tells us that Neanderthals had a more advanced visual processing system than us.

That hasn't been proved. There are many indications to the contrary.



Autism cannot exist in Bonobo, since Autism basically is an inability to understand neurotypical humans.

That explains where I got it. My anthro classes were definitely "some years ago." Like, last century. Whether I'm part Neanderthal or not, I'm definitely practically a fossil.

Imagine how wise I'll feel when I'm a gray-headed old woman telling the grandkids stories about "back in the winter of '09..."

Uphill, both ways, in the snow...

...when the Neanderthals roamed...

...oh my Gods I'm laughing so hard I can't type.

Objectively subhuman?? No, of course not. Duh.

Can I pretty much guarantee that some f***head will trot it out as a reason we ought to be in the zoo instead of on the street?? And that I'll take it to heart and get all pissed off about it??

Suffice it to say that I can read the petroglyphs on the wall.

Although Burzum is correct that the scientific name for Neanderthals is simply "Homo neanderthalensis" today (Homo sapiens sapiens is also no longer correct, it is only one sapiens now), Neanderthals are still human. A human being is a member of the genus Homo, not necessarily a Homo sapiens.

There is no reason to assume that Neanderthals were less advanced than our sapiens ancestors 40,000 years ago. If we interbred with them, this might be the reason that they are no longer around. In that case, they didn't become extinct because we were the more advanced species or they couldn't cope with environmental changes. They only died out in the same sense that Cro-Magnon humans died out, namely by being replaced by their hybrid descendants. I don't see why our Neanderthal ancestry should be any worse or more embarrassing than our H. sapiens ancestry.

PS: Neanderthals are not the only extinct human species that contributed some DNA to modern day humans. We are all mutts and mongrels:
http://www.livescience.com/16171-deniso ... -asia.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14947363

Yes, same difference.

I guess we decided that we DIDN'T merit two "sapiens." I'd have to concur.

Frankly, given the way some of us act, I'm more embarrassed to count myself an anatomically modern human being. Some days I think I'd prefer to be a chimpanzee (or just about anything more complex than, say, protozoa). My housecats decidedly comport themselves better than some humans do.

Chimpanzees aren't much better than humans, imho They are very aggressive and territorial, wage war on neighboring chimp populations and sometimes kill one another, and hunt their smaller simian relatives for food. Some biologists argue that they are in fact human and should be reclassified as Homo troglodytes.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... nzees.html

This reminds me of dogs and the lumps some possess on the top of their heads...Can we tie this phenomena to any canine behaviors or is it simply a lump on the top of doggy head? Skulls have bumps, whether human or canine.

It's reasonable enough to call something from a (significantly) earlier time "less evolved" (in general - some things hit their niche and stay there.) The distinction that needs to be made is between progress accrued from evolution over time - which has fairly incontrovertibly been a forward movement as the critters of today have a whole bunch of nifty features their remote ancestors didn't - and the directionless nature of the evolutionary process itself.

Also, where can I get some occipital chips for my bun?

There is some archeological evidence that Neanderthals may have been food for modern humans:

http://www.lkse.net.au/PhDThesis.pdf

These author cite this paper but in that paper cited that view is only 1 possible hypothesis:

http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/ ... zRozzi.pdf

In the given context it doesn't make any sense to apply the label "less evolved" to Neanderthal since they may be considered contemporaries of modern humans.

In the broader sense, I'd quibble your association of "progress" with "evolved" or "forward movement". Consider the environment on earth in the next few hundred million years when all the earths oceans will have boiled away due to incresing energy output from the sun. Life, if it still exists will likely have simplified to far less complicated forms and survive as it can under the surface (like Desulforudis audaxviator). Life will have evolved yet have lost all those nifty features you speak of.

At the same time, Neanderthals may have hunted and eaten H. sapiens:
http://weinterrupt.com/2009/09/independ ... rthal-man/



I think both species had to hunt and eat whatever they could get during the last ice age. But I also think that different groups of of each species have interacted on completely different terms with one another. I mean, Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted for 5 - 7000 years. A lot can happen during such a time span. And there is evidence for technology exchange between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, so at least some groups must have gotten along on peaceful terms.

Last edited by CrazyCatLord on 31 Jan 2012, 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There is no such thing as a higher evolved species. There are more advanced species with more advanced cultures and technology, but those are a very anthropocentric criteria. In terms of evolution, there are only sufficiently adapted species that possess different degrees of evolutionary fitness (which is measured in the number of offspring produced). Cyanobacteria are just as well-adapted and evolutionary fit as humans, even though they haven't changed for billions of years.