what do we think of Neanderthals: buried dead, did art - are they human? what are implications?
NOprophet_NØprofit
Shipmate
in Purgatory
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/surprising-facts-about-neanderthals
Are they part of the human family? Even if extinct. Do they get salvation, heaven, it's mind boggling.
Are they part of the human family? Even if extinct. Do they get salvation, heaven, it's mind boggling.
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*Especially since everyone except people of sub-Saharan Africa has Neanderthal DNA.
I believe the current thinking is that most Europeans are a little bit neanderthal, i.e. neanderthals are conspecifics with us, though there's been a pendulum in scientific thinking on that point in my lifetime.
(Inasmuch as I think Neanderthals are classed as a subspecies of homo sapiens, I suppose we were technically correct, albeit for the wrong reasons ...)
Is that right? I love these strange oddities. You didn't put Evilution.
The issue would be if we have an almost-human category. Even extinct this has play with two issues, evolution and racism (slavery). Each of the various churches [and secular organisations] have had interest in having people they had no responsibility for. It was a huge fight for (English Missionary Non-conformists like Wray&Smith in Demeera) to get slaves to be allowed to go to church while the Colonial Church was burning down Knibb's church. Whereas Whitefield campaigned for slavery in Georgia.
Guess.
The practical implications includes a recognition that humanity is very broad in terms of physical and intellectual attributes, and that the "racial" categorisations of homo sapiens sapiens are even more absurd than they were before we were so aware of the breadth of human characteristics. If we start to make artificial divisions between groups of humans and say of some "well, they're not really human" or "they don't deserve the rights we consider all humans to have" then where do we stop? Do we start applying those statements to other "races"? What about those born with chromosomal differences, those with genetic differences?
It's not even guessing. As in not even wrong. And I don't. Guess. Not as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Nobody is going to have a Neanderthal turn up one Sunday morning and say "what must I do to be saved?"
Pinheads anyone?
The thought, though, was because it begins the exploration of what makes us think we humans are so special. As Alan begins to explore, our species did not pop into being fully formed. It is rather difficult to pick a point in our evolution and find the instruction “Insert soul here”.
Perhaps, but:
(emphasis mine).
As I've said before*, anthropology appears to me to be highly speculative, as well as dominated by egos. (In the link in the OP I see Lucy has been downgraded to an 'ancient ape'; I'm sure she used to be depicted as practically the kind of person who you might have as a neighbour).
*Settle in for 5 pages of the pitfalls of attempting to distinguish different categories of human based on origins. I've been looking for this thread since the new OP.
If it isn't that one, it's another. And then it goes back further to other species. When the heck are we human and special?
Also Homo habilis, Homo australopithecus, Homo erectus, and right back to the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and the other extant primates and if that common ancestor is human then chimpanzees are also human.
In order to decide what is and isn't (a) human we need to figure out what qualities define being (a) human and I suspect that will take us into very murky waters.
My view is that humans are not special in any objective sense and any special status we subjectively grant humans is based on self-interest.
Odd. I understood it perfectly as a reply to and extension of my post immediately above it regarding how we define what it is to be (a) human. Martin54's "Timmy" is a member of our species but completely devoid of any attributes we would normally expect to find in a human. Therefore, should we regard Timmy as a human and treat him accordingly? Or not? And what are the ramifications of the decision
The question asked in the OP, however, takes us into deeper waters. Our understanding of intelligence the theory of mind , and just what constitutes awareness is changing. The list of creatures recognising the concept of self is growing. Ants, freakin' ants, appear to pass the mirror test. And whilst a sculpture titled Ameise mit Schädel* might be a bit too far, so is human equals the Precious.
*Ant with Skull
His post is, however, typically elliptical to the point of obscurity.
Next thing you know, they'll discover a neanderthal comb and have to adjust their ugly hairmop pictures. Ho hum.
Speaking as someone whose DNA tests show me to be almost 2% Neandertal (and my father was slightly more than that), I agree. Of course they were human, as human as any of us. We just know potentials in most cases, of course, but the lung capacity looks excellent for the field of opera.
Ants, like I said, seem to be self aware. Ants help their own. The dividing line becomes less clear all the time. Which could easily boil down to We are aware of the God we invented.
This is how I understood Martin's post, too. I'm not quite sure why it's difficult. I've come across elsewhere questions about people like Timmy.
Or grasping our projections is very difficult. In therapy, we talk of withdrawing them, but there is an argument that divine power should be projected, otherwise humans get too inflated and omnipotent. But in the end, I don't think we have much choice where we stow projected stuff. If some religious symbol resonates with you, then it does, and if not, not.
But we now know that this is not true - that everyone except the Africans are partly Neanderthal. We are not distinct from them. They are part of us. They were human. ANd the fact that Alice Roberts has more Neanderthal DNA than Bill Bailey shows how meaningless it is to judge on this basis.
Of course this totally undermines the White Supremaciset argument. Because if anyone is "Pure Human", it is the Africans.
As to comparing Neanderthals with us, humans have quite a knack for simultaneously wanting to be the pinnacle of creation and feeling existentially lonely, so we seek out space aliens who we want to be both superior and fun to hang out with, and animals to live with; and only see what we want to see. And we shout a lot, to feel less alone.
So we push/pull ourselves in contradictory directions, and get all tangled up. It's hard for us to consider that God might love Neanderthals; that we might have more in common with them than we think; that we might not be God's favorite (or that God doesn't have favorites)...or that humans (of our (sub-) species) aren't necessarily "The Answer To Life, The Universe, And Everything". Maybe the Neanderthals were the ones who were supposed to survive.
And those descended from them without inter-mixture. The First People here had lived fo about 60,000 years in near total isolation (at least as far as we currently know save for some very limited contacts between those in the far north and the peoples of New Guinea and Indonesia).
Now we can look forward to meeting Neanderthals in heaven.
Of course, it won’t be heaven without animals anyway, so who decides which ones get in? Does God only allow the ‘human friendly’ domesticated ones? Does She allow us to continue to eat them?
So many questions, so few answers.
Source.
I don't know who everybody is of course. Still, my sister suffers terribly from allergies so I reckon there's a fair whack of Neanderthal in us.
If only there were a way that whoever makes a bizarre claim like Africans having no Neanderthal genes could be backed up when they make it.
Not sure what this has to do with Neanderthals but I am interested in the case of Timmy.
The percentage of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is zero or close to zero in people from African populations, and is about 1 to 2 percent in people of European or Asian background. The percentage of Denisovan DNA is highest in the Melanesian population (4 to 6 percent), lower in other Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander populations, and very low or undetectable elsewhere in the world.
That said, the diversity of the human family is quite extensive and actually very interesting to trace. Even Darwin would be amazed at what we know of the story now.
I will let God be God. How God cares for the human family is a mystery.
Further there is more genetic variation within the group you'd label as African than there is between the group you'd label as African and white, Asian or anything else. And people you'd identify as African have what you'd call white genes and heritage, among other things. Race is clearly only skin deep and based on a Euro-white idea.