WERE THE NEANDERTHALS HUMANS (HOMO SAPIENS – HS)?

In “Contested Bones,” geneticist John Sanford writes that the majority of the paleontological scholars now regard the Neanderthals as HS. He cites paleoanthropologist Clive Finlayson, Director of the Gibraltar Museum, who has claimed that the evidence for their humanity is overwhelming:

·       The irony is that the scientific community is going to have to come round to the acceptance that the Denisovans and the Neanderthals also belonged to the species which we all call Homo sapiens. (BBC News, 31 December 2010)

This is an important question. Many had tried to make the case that these were a separate species. Early paleontological drawings characterized Neanderthals as apes, even though their morphology contradicted these depictions. Sanford writes that:

·       Since the time of Darwin, Neanderthals have been proclaimed to the world as a separate sub-human species, unworthy of the classification Homo sapiens.

They argued that Neanderthals were our pre-human ancestors to support their contention that we had evolved from our ape-like ancestors. However, according to Sanford, this claim has been overturned:

·       There is now compelling evidence, from numerous sources, that the Neanderthals were fully human and should be classified as Homo sapiens. Neanderthal anatomy is overwhelmingly modern—as the paleo community now universally concedes. The most notable differences are confined to the skull; however those same features are seen in certain skulls belonging to Homo sapiens...many contemporary paleo-experts have further noted that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens can be arranged into a morphological continuum, which argues against their separateness as a species.. (51)

Even the “sequencing of the Neanderthal genome confirmed” that they too were human. Sanford adds that “the Neanderthals lived together in the same communities [as HS], intermarried, worked together, and were buried together” (51). On the average, we even have 1-4% distinctively Neanderthal genes.

As a result, some experts now maintain that they didn’t die off. Instead, they “disappeared” through assimilation.

This evidence should silence the theory that the Neanderthals had been our pre-human ancestors.