Neandermyths
OK, this is what I went to John Hawks’ superlative anthroblog for. The Neanderthal news. Chatter recently about cloning Neanderchimps, which sounds like an incredibly bad idea, and Hawks suggests they’ll end up dipping into the publicly available human DNA pool once the ethical “discussion” is over. The “Frankenstein” tag suggests Hawks is a nay vote on fun with ancient hominid DNA. Look, if the pointy-headed scientists are going to do it, it’ll be hard to stop them. Just stay out of the CODIS criminal DNA pool, thanks. The last thing we need is a hybrid Neanderpsychopath running around.
Meanwhile, Hawks executes a takedown on popular Neanderthal myths:
1. “[H]e’d probably grow up into a kick ass middle linebacker.”
Neandertals were hunter-gatherers, and males had an average mass of around 80 kg (176 pounds). College linebackers weigh around 240 pounds — they’re not the real big players, because they have to run and move with great agility. Most college linebackers are around 6-2, Neandertal men were around 5-6.
Weight training and diet routinely make good high school linebackers weighing 180 into college linebackers. So there’s nothing impossible about making a Neandertal into a linebacker, albeit a relatively short one. But their frame wouldn’t give them any inherent advantage that I can see.
Now, wrestling on the other hand, matched for weight, might be interesting…
More Neandermyths debunked at the link.
As others have commented, clean up a Neanderthal and put him in sneakers, jeans, a t-shirt and a windbreaker and you probably wouldn’t look twice at him on the subway. White button-down and cheap necktie, he’d pass in the office. Put a bowtie on him and an Obama bumpersticker on his 1986 Volvo, you might mistake him for a blueblood Harvard grad. I had a boss once who pretty closely matched that description up there. 176 pounds. Hunter-gatherer. Handy with a spear. Not afraid of woolly mammoths. Low brow ridge. Not someone you’d want to wrestle with. Had advanced beyond “Ugh” to “Hey, asshole.”
Topics: Neanderthals
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:02 pm Comments (0) on Tuesday, December 2, 2008
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