"My" Neanderthal ancestors

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Last week I mentioned a story about scientists having now detected evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens (Us) interbred at some point in the past with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Them, specifically DNA obtained from several Neanderthal individuals discovered in Croatia, thus the "My" in the title.) This would have occurred as humans were leaving Africa on their way out to populate Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, since all of these peoples have the Neanderthal gene trace (1-4% of the genome) while those groups that remained in sub-Saharan Africa do not have this trace at all. I was quite pleased to hear this as it introduced all sorts of interesting possibilities for wild speculation, and if there is one thing I love it's wild scientific speculation. :-)

This does present some difficulties for the Reasons to Believe theory of Old Earth Creationism, where humans are considered to be a special creation, not evolved from previous hominids as most other scientists believe. RTB holds that those hominids that precede humans in the fossil record were animals with some unique abilities like tool making, advanced cognitive abilities and such but that they did not have the Imago Dei, or the Image of God. They hold that the Neanderthals were a separate species from true humans. Listening to their most recent podcast on the subject I felt that they were still struggling to deal with the new information and they really hadn't figured out a good way to shoe-horn it into the theory. I'm sure they will eventually twist it into some sort of fit but it seems they are being forced to reach pretty far on this one.

Oddly enough this does not present any significant difficulties for the Young Earth Creationist crowd such as Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research who have always maintained that the Neanderthals and Homo-Erectus type of hominids were fully human anyway, so that interbreeding is not an issue for them.

The news also is not a problem for standard evolutionary theory of course, it's a surprise but it was always a possibility, they just had not had any evidence for it before now.

Two bits of speculation that the RTB people put out yesterday are that the "reason" God allowed this interbreeding with "animals" (they maintained that Human-Neanderthal interbreeding would have been the sin of bestiality in their podcast) was to introduce racial diversity into the population after the flood as part of the tower of Babel dispersion event. In other words it helped to make people different enough that they would avoid each other and move away to different places to live. This speculation was based on the fact that a few years ago it was announced that Neanderthals were pale skinned and red haired, and that one of the differences they found in the genomes of the non-African populations was on a gene that selects for pigmentation. I suppose then that for some reason this lighter skin color would have been selected for in Europe more than most other places. It is known that the lighter skin allows a more efficient use of limited sunlight to produce vitamin D for example. This interbreeding event would explain where that gene came from in the first place while not requiring a random mutation to explain it, which is pretty cool. The second bit of speculation was that this news makes it almost certain that Adam and Eve were black Africans, which is also pretty cool :-)

I continue to think that RTB has the best basic model to work with from a biblical perspective. God clearly created different species IMO, but just how narrowly you define species is open to a lot of debate and is fertile ground for study (or better for me Wild Speculation!) I tend to think that the divine interventions to create new species were less frequent than RTB thinks, so that there are many related species extant today that have evolved through natural selection from a common ancestor. I think probably horses, zebras and donkeys for example descended from a common ancestor. I don't know where the lines would be drawn but I think it very unlikely that fish evolved into land dwelling reptiles or reptiles into mammals. Of course the main biological creation event would have been the very first life. There is no remotely plausible scenario that gets you from ordinary non-living chemicals to a living cell. Every single explanation I've heard of for the origin of life, other than it being designed and specially created, is laughably unlikely to have happened.

I look forward to hearing more on this over the next several months and even years, science is always learning new things which makes it endlessly fascinating. This should be fun to watch :-)

Posted via email from The Angry Gnome