Atheist Age

We’re racist and bigoted to ourselves; imagine another species

I often wonder at how wonderful it must have been to encounter another species not terribly unlike our own. The electric thrill our ancestors never knew that would one day occupy our dreams, was perhaps mundane if not unwelcome in the struggle for survival.

Of course, usually this type of thought leads me to contemplate the evolution of species and the wonder of life. We are indeed a mere animal, albeit highly evolved and clever enough to destroy our habitat and deny so. Yet noting the 107 billion humans to have lived on our planet, and that none have ever satisfactorily proven an afterlife nor any person ‘returned’ we are privileged doubly to be alive at this time.

Still, even today toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century the same brains that calculated the age of our universe intentionally and scurrilously lie, deny and discriminate. The ultimate result of this cowardice is the suffering of so many million human beings.

If we scammed up tricks to torture, maim and abuse all humans of every age in every culture at all times in our history, imagine the suffering we would have inflicted on another species – as well as ourselves.

From © New Scientist Why Did Our Species Survive The Neanderthals?

ONCE upon a time, a race of cavemen ruled Europe and Asia, then mysteriously vanished, leaving little but bones and stone tools behind.

The history of the Neanderthals isn’t a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph.

Take their disappearance, which a team led by Finlayson has pinpointed to the rock of Gibraltar, between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal bones in Belgium in 1829, anthropologists have proposed any number of explanations for their extinction.

Some said Neanderthals were too dim-witted to survive climatic upheaval or the arrival of our ancestors from Africa. Others contended that their diet – big mammals that were also becoming rare – did them in, while Homo sapiens‘s more catholic diet gave them the edge to survive. Some even argued that Neanderthals didn’t go extinct at all, but interbred with H. sapiens.

None of these just-so stories quite add up, Finlayson says. There is no clear indication that Neanderthals were any less intelligent than H. sapiens, and genetic evidence has shown that they share with humans key changes in Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language. The distinction between Neanderthal and human technology isn’t as clear-cut as palaeoanthropologists sometimes suggest, and Neanderthals hunted smaller game and seafood where it was available. Meanwhile, a first-draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome offers no sign that they contributed to our gene pool.

So why did Neanderthals go extinct?…..

Devour the remaining article here

Tags: Archeology, Biology, Evolution, General, Science