Environmental News

Current understanding of (we) humans and closely related species.

- Because readers might want to know
- Backgrounding a new publication on Neanderthal demise

This is an OK starting point:
https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution

While recognizing that new details (bones) will be found in future, and new interpretations may come into general acceptance.

Homo neanderthalensis had time and space overlap with H. sapiens. The former persists to an extent in our genome because of, well, ‘interactions’. Their exit may be further explained by this new study:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260427050609.htm

TL,DR: their social networks were more limited and less effective.

So, next time readers despair over Facebook or twiX or even Priuschat (!), give this a thought.

 

If you mean sapiens and neanderthalensis, the abundance of opinion is yes.

 

We get few links to Inst. Creation Res here. I'd not oppose more

I quote an interesting sentence therefrom:
"Burial implies an awareness of the after life and demonstrates the existence of formal ritual."

As it contains two separate assertions. Second is "formal ritual" and does not call for much justification in my view. Dead of any group mean something, as they do while alive. "formal" adjective is undefined, but no quibble. Burial might only imply knowledge developed over time that corpses attract scavengers, thus corpses should be made unavailable. But there is much evidence (some mentioned here) that burials included rituals.

The first assertion there "Burial implies an awareness of the after life" does not slide in. Burial is consistent with beliefs concerning afterlives. Cremation is also consistent with beliefs concerning afterlives (do any theologies assert otherwise?). Tibetan Buddhism occupies a niche with corpse-scavenging leading to afterlives. Yes weird, but one should take a wide view.

Human afterlife is based on existence of a soul persistent. That troubles me not at all (in fact I prefer it), but how corpses are treated isn't central to soul notions.

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Constructing a sentence with both a strong claim and a weak claim may satisfy a lot of people, a lot of times. See I did not say fool a lot of people.

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But pro tip to any making rational arguments; do not construct sentences that confound wheat with chaff. Not even within paragraphs. Make some paragraphs with evidence presented by you. Make other paragraphs based on speculation, deserving 'print' because knowledge might later be harvested.

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Overlong reply based on one sentence quoted? Preposterous. Some/many other sentences there pose no problems, but I'm not going one by one, and none of y'all would read it anyway.

And yet: "Neanderthal anatomy is essentially human in scope, with the same number of bones as humans ..." AFAIK fossilized/recovered bone counts are never a basis for species separations.

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Genomic separations of species is currently hot topic, so I'd not link to a page with 1998 publications as newest.