DALE DRINNON: A Different Face For Neanderthals

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/05/different-face-for-neanderthals.html

NEANDERTHALS IN NORTH AMERICA, COULD SUCH A THING BE? ASK DALE

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/02/north-american-neanderthals.html

DALE DRINNON: Neanderthal Snubnoses Again

Back when Heuvelmans was alive and we were discussing his interpretation of the Iceman I said that most experts would disagree with his interpretation of the Neanderthal's nose being like the Iceman's.

However, I did the following little demonstration for him as well: I altered Jay Maternes' reconstruction of the Shanidar Neanderthal to something like the Iceman's snubnosed condition just by rotating the end of the nose relative to the rest of the head.

I should also note that the Shanidar skull in question illustrates one peculiar feature often found in European Neanderthal (although Shanidar is in the Near East): the highest point of the cranium is in back and the skull slopes steeply away from that point both before and behind.

This could be what causes some witnesses to say the almas has a head that is pointed in back. Other types of early humans do not have this feature and in fact some of the first Neanderthal skulls found (such as the one at La Chapelle-aux-Saints) were incorrectly reconstructed without it, and with the profile of the cranium too low in back.

Homo erectus incidentally never has anything like it and if anything, erectus tends to have a higher peak in the front of the cranium, and tapers away to the rear in profile.

DALE DRINNON: Item of interest

I found this while on a photo search for something else. It is from a site that advertises antique human skull memorabilia for sale. There is a section displaying several stone skull replicas from the orient, and in this case from Tibet, Chinese Turkestan and Mongolia. Most of them are not very realistic and mostly stylised. This one caught my eye because it was not only more realistic, it is decidedly Neanderthaloid. The teeth are somehat schematic, and not many individual teeth are indicated. But the shape of the forehead, brow and eye sockets are nicely done and very accurate if that is the type the sculptor is representing.

I'll tell you another thing: the nose as depicted does not show the nasal openings the way they really look on look on the skull. It shows a faithful representation of the Iceman's nose only at a smaller size.

The sculpture being done in stone, there is no way it can really be dated directly. The site says these skulls are from various periods but as far back as before the beginnings of Chinese history. This being one of the better made ones also makes me think it is more recent than that.

POSTSCRIPT: I have been trying to get this comparison photo to you for a while: it is a good shot of a Neanderthal skull in comparable position to put beside the jade representation. I had to screen dozens of candidate alternatives to get this one skull in this one view, and it would be a pity if it did not get to you. This is a museum display case view of the original (I think).

DALE DRINNON: Pugnoses Part 2: On the Ice

There have been many commentators on the 'Iceman' body examined and described by Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans. Most of the expressed opinions on the matter made by others are completely worthless.

There have been claims by certain persons that they have manufactured the model body that was used in the Iceman exhibit. These are false claims. Ordinarily the claimants will identify features that the body examined by Sanderson and Heuvelmans did NOT have, and in fact the claims usually cite features of the second iceman exhibit and that one definitely did not match the first one, most especially in the face. I have seen Heuvelmans's original photographs in Sanderson's files and I could see that the two icemen as exhibited did not match and could not both be the same model (as Napier alleges in his book Bigfoot) Furthermore, the head has a distinctly Neanderthaloid facial skeleton. An allegation made by the Balls states that the body they manufactured was based on a Cro-Magnon man: there is no way that they could have been looking at a Cro-Magnon body and put distinctively Neanderthal characteristics on it. If they knew enough to make such an accurate depiction, they would most certainly have known the difference.

Similarly, the facial skeleton is definitely NOT characteristic of Homo erectus: Neanderthal browridges were arched and erectus' browridges ran across the face in a straight horizontal line. The shape of the eye sockets alone tells the tale, and several prominent Cryptozoologists that have pronounced the body to belong to the species Homo erectus have merely demonstrated that they do not have enough technical knowledge to make the distinction.

One of these Cryptozoologists is Mark Hall. Mark Hall did in fact send me material on the so-called "Homo gardarensis" skull found in Greenland and dating from the Viking age.

It is also clearly a primitive hominid of very large size, and not a modern human with acromegaly as has been alleged.

This one skull pretty much clinches the matter entirely.




As far as the Iceman goes, I have read Heuvelmans's book on it, which has been written in French but never published in English. It is a very impressive and convincing book and I reproduce several tables and illustrations from it. Before I saw the copy Heuvelmans and I had exchanged letters on the subject, and he graciously sent me copies of articles about it: he also put me in touch with Loofs-Wissowa, and I communicated with the latter over the phone a few times. I had told Heuvelmans that even going by Sanderson's drawings, I could tell that he (Heuvelmans) had been correct in his identification but Sanderson himself had missed several telling signs. I also told him that what he called Homo pongiodes could not be considered either an unknown species nor an unknown animal, to which he quite readily agreed.

I had made up some transparencies for lectures back in the late 1980s and on them I had cut-out portions of Sanderson's Iceman drawing and Neanderthal fossil material. I include scans of those transparencies here. In the original, I could take the Iceman face or hand and lay the transparency over the corresponding Neanderthal part and the set would match up practically perfectly.

The Neanderthal hand skeleton, which matches the Iceman's hand, is also close to the Pangboche hand. In Ivan Sanderson's book Abominable Snowmen: Legend come to life, he states that the bony structure of the Pangboche hand was identified as possibly Neanderthaloid by Ostman Hill and definitely o by Russian experts. That constitutes an exact scientific classification of identity by separate assessments. There are also other such hands reported in Central Asia, some of them retaining the hairy covering (red being stated in one such case). That too goes on to confirm the identity.
It is also pretty certain that the Central Asian Almas is anatomically close to Neanderthals. I include my comparisons for a Neanderthal (hairless body) reconstruction with a magazine illustration representing Caucasian sightings (that from Sanderson's files) and another comparing an old Neanderthal head restoration, with something of a pug nose also, to a reconstruction of the Almas (marked "A". the latter was compiled from several "Blobsquatxch" photos. The region of the back of the neck looks different but that would be because the live Almas had thick hair back there.

Any one of these things would be enough. Frankly, once you have the Gardar skull you do not need to say the Iceman was genuine. Once you have established that the Pangboch hand has a Neanderthaloid anatomy, you do not even need the Gardar skull.. And in fact once you have DNA samples from hairs that consistently fall into the Neanderthal genetic range, you do not need anything else.

I do not claim to have solved the mystery. All I am doing is pointing out that the mystery was already solved years ago.

And kindly allow me to repeat my earlier statement: it is a recognised school of thought that Neanderthals are only a subspecies of Homo sapiens. That does not have to be currently popular among theorists in order for the term Homo sapiens neanderhalensis to still be on the books and still be in use. Therefore if these creatures really are Neanderthals, it automatically follows that they are H. sapiens. And you cannot call your own species unknown. The default assumption in the case of all of these hairy Wildmen running around must be that they are all actually HUMAN.

[Note: There has been some insinuation that the Iceman could not have been a real body because human bodies would not be on display in a sideshow exhibit. That was an incorrect assumption: for example, the body of poor Julia Pastrana wound up as a sideshow exhibit, alongside her stuffed and mounted baby. It does sound like the reason the original body of the Iceman was swapped for a fabricated model is that the FBI was about to look into the matter, and evidently the real owner - whoever that might have been - had a strong disliking for being investigated by the FBI]

There are also such things as large human teeth ascribed to the Eastern Bigfoot that match the Neanderthaloid taurodont pattern, and other alleged remains ranging from hair samples that match each other and fall in the Neanderthal range up to whole alleged skeletons, as well as several purported examples.

GUEST BLOGGER JAN EDWARDS: Neanderthals

I don’t know if anyone here has read “Neanderthal” by John Darnton. It’s a novel, and like all good novels, the author has done a hell-of-a-lot of research in its production. I have only just started reading it, and it will take me a while, because I have 4 other books in various stages of being read (does anyone else do this?)

In its first few chapters, it poses the question What Happened to Neanderthal Man?
Was it a major geological/astrological happening? If so, how come Homo sapiens lived and thrived when Homo Neanderthalensis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, depending on whether you think he was a sub-species of modern man or a separate species) was lost.

The novel dips into the realm of Jurassic Park with the “shock revelation” that pockets of Neanderthal still live on in the high mountains and out-of-reach places in the world, and that some reports of Bigfoot and his kin are mislabeled Neanderthals.

So what DID happen to him? Did modern man engage in genocide/war with Neanderthal? Are we a product of interbreeding with him? Could we have killed all the males and bred with the females, as is common with warring parties? – after all, humans are a violent, sex-mad species.
And suppose.... just for one moment .... that the author is at least partially right, and that pockets of Neanderthal live on. How long before we send missionaries to convert them? How long before they are dragged screaming and kicking into the 21st century? Get their slot on prime time TV? How long before we trade them weapons for drugs, or whatever? Or am I just cynical?

NATURE BLOGS ROUND UP

Team in Germany maps Neanderthal genome

Researchers in Germany have completed the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, 3 billion genetic building blocks that will shed new light on the ancient hominid as well as the origins of its closest relation — humans. The team teased enough DNA out of three 38,000-year-old bone fragments to isolate some 3 billion DNA base pairs. The Neanderthal genome contains roughly 3.2 billion pairs, but many of lead scientist Svante Paabo are repeats, meaning his draft is about 63 percent complete.

Read on…

New Alaskan Ichthyosaur Unveiled

The University of Alaska Museum of the North has unveiled what officials call one of the largest, oldest and northernmost marine reptile fossils ever found.

Officials say the fossil sat in the Brooks Range for almost 210 million years before it was discovered in 1950, eventually arriving in Fairbanks.

Read on…

Humans got crabs from gorillas!

Just as humans and gorillas share a common evolutionary ancestry, the pubic lice that infuriate some members of the two species are also related. Pubic lice–known to scientists as Pthirus pubis and to most other people as “crabs”–are thought to have evolved from Pthirus gorillae, the structurally similar species that infests gorillas. Genetic analysis by David Reed at the University of Florida indicates that the lice lineages split about 3.3 million years ago, whereas it is believed that humans diverged from gorillas at least 7 million years ago. This suggests that “early humans somehow caught pubic lice from their gorilla cousins.”

Read on…