Neandertals were fully human

Reconstruction of a Neandertal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich.



Joel Kontinen

Our understanding of what Neandertal men looked like has changed incredibly in 150 years. At first, evolutionists described them as grunting, stooped ape-like cavemen.

In contrast, creationists have believed that as descendants of Adam, Neandertals were fully human just like us. Later, Darwinists began to change their views when discoveries suggested that Neandertal men were able to make musical instruments, tools and jewellery and most probably could also speak.

A fresh study suggests that the creationist view is much closer to the truth than the Darwinian one.

Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and colleagues sequenced 60 per cent of the Neandertal genome. They published their research results this week in Science. They obtained most of the DNA from three bones found in Croatia and read the draft genome 1.3 times.

Usually, to eliminate errors, researchers sequence a genome 10-20 times, so these results are very preliminary.

The research suggests that the genomes of Europeans and Asians are 1-4 per cent Neandertal.

This should not surprise us. According to the creationist view, Neandertals most probably lived in Europe in the harsh climate during the ice age following the global flood of Noah’s day.

Sources:

Dalton, Rex. 2010. European and Asian genomes have traces of Neanderthal. Nature News 6 May. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100506/full/news.2010.225.html


Green, Richard E. & al. 2010. A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome. Science 328 (5979), 710 – 722. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5979/710