Neanderthal: the First Caucasian?

or ...Rethinking Damn Near Everything

Let's start by tearing up the current playbook of Anthropology. The following reports by paleogeneticists, if the evidence proves out, could put the lie to just about everything we hold sacred regarding human Genesis.

According to "Researchers led by Paabo, Richard E. Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School compared the genetic material collected from the bones of three Neanderthals with that from five modern humans.
Their findings, reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science, show a relationship between Neanderthals and modern people outside Africa, Paabo said.
"That suggests that interbreeding occurred in the Middle East, where both modern humans and Neanderthals lived thousands of years ago, he said." Associated Press

It is generally agreed that a large group of early humans left from Africa about sixty thousand years ago. We'll call them the Beta People. When they reached Sinai or the Levant; they met another group, the Alpha People, already in long time residence. Precisely nine months later another group was born. We will call them the Crypto People.

(depiction)






mnfu.world








Alpha Person (A.K.A. Neanderthal)

(depiction)

Beta Persons (A.K.A. Cro-Magnon) With Crypto young.


Crystalinks

The Alpha People had been living for perhaps 250 thousand years in the area from the Levant to Western Siberia, north to Southern Germany and East as far as the British Isles. These two groups apparently began to coexist and exchange DNA.

Perhaps as many as five thousand years later, from roughly Afganistan, a group split off from the main, settled South Asia and finally ended up in Oceana. Much later, a second large contingent skirted below the Urals Eastward; settled throughout Central Asia and ultimately, the Americas. Lastly, a third group continued to drift slowly throughout Europe, settling East of the Urals. All of these groups carried the Alpha (Neanderthal) DNA markers.

In time the later group began to occupy areas inhabited solely by Alpha People and as they continued to fill the area, the indigenous Alpha People melted away and eventually, 30 thousand years ago, disappeared from history. Does this indicate total assimilation, annihilation or were other, still to be uncovered factors, responsible?

In the succeeding eons the European contingent surely experienced an Alpha presence for infinitely longer periods than did the groups who struck out earlier. Therefore:

...the Neanderthals more like modern Europeans, with light skin and hair colour and language abilities..." said Dr Carles Lalueza-Fox, a molecular biologist at the University of Barcelona, in a commentary in Science.

So considering the recent finding of interbreeding between the Alphas and Betas and considering also the geographical area where the potential for cross-breeding lasted longest, should we not conclude that Neanderthal was indeed the First Caucasian?

"While many people think of Neanderthals as very primitive, they had tools for things like hunting and sewing, controlled fire, lived in shelters and buried their dead. We have met Neanderthal and he is us — at least a little. The most detailed look yet at the Neanderthal genome helps answer one of the most debated questions in anthropology: Did Neanderthals and modern humans mate?
The answer is yes, there is at least some cave man biology in most of us. Between 1 percent and 4 percent of genes in people from Europe and Asia trace back to Neanderthals." Associated Press

Question: Much is being made of the slight, 1 to 4%, Alpha (Neanderthal) DNA remaining with us today, as suggesting very little interbreeding occurred. Rather, should we not assume the progeny of this endless mating had a lot more than 4% Alpha DNA originally? And should we not conclude that after all the Alphas became extinct (or were assimilated) the next 30 thousand years of breeding sans Alphas, explains the low remaining Alpha DNA numbers in modern populations? Are we not, then, descendents and heirs of the Crypto children?

That big, not so dumb Troglodyte Alpha, standing in front of his cave throwing stones at the Hyenas, was he not your great-grand pere, at considerable remove?