Homos and their history, with their subspecies

So we goes on with homos and their lovely history this time. Also throwing in their subspecies for that matter. Evolution is a good way to go, with depth or not. We kind of like depth, with a kind of depth of view on this whole thing. Right? Do we like depth? I don’t hear you! Do we like depth? Yes, of course we do! No bones about it. We do, though, go for the rambling. We also like ramblings, as much as we like that depth. So. Here we go. Enough rambling (and more to come!) already.

Thanks to our beloved Linné (yep, that man, with the peas), us “people persons” got our scientistic name in 1758, a wonderful latin name, and called you and me “Homo Sapiens”. What does it mean? There are lot of thinkies out there on that subject. Some say “the thinking person”, while other say “human being or man”, or even “the wise one”. So that’s what we all are? Thinkely people with a dash of human beings being a man, which, of course, is wise and loveable. We are species filled with monkey genes from the “apeman” as some would reckon to it, and yes, and their subbies, filled with ideologiesities from Darwin, steppin’ right up the red carpets of evolution. Right? Such a wide subject to get into, but so wide to be interesting. We likey. And when we like something, we do ramble. Ramble is good for that matter. Yes. We do like rambling after all.

So. Where shall we start. In the world of Marvels Universe, or the scientistic way? Science is my discipline, the world is my country and science is also my religion, and that’s too bad for you. No, wait. I might go the Marvel way to go too. I hear a great yey for Stan Lee!

Okay, we go sciencifistico first. I have two legs, and I’m called a primate, and yes, I do belong to the Homo Sapiens way of evolution. My family is called hominidae, which means I am a human monkey, so to say. So they say, my stuffies are filled with a highly intelligent brain. We can go the abstract way of thinking, talk (since we usually have a cool gene called FOXP2, which makes us do languages and also give us grammatical competence, which our other homos didn’t have in their pockets) and understand different languages and a mind of our own (okay, some of us do, actually …). But what about them Homo Neanderthalis? Them Neanderthals. Yes. Size ain’t all, because size don’t usually matter, they say, but is that really so? A swedish biologist being specialized in evolutionary genetics. named Svante Pääbo, is saying that their DNA has absolutely no affinity to mine and yours. But another lovely anthtropolitican, say that our genes are mixed from interbreeding between these two species. But, since our species have a high rate of intelligence, why can’t we work together with it? Always disagreeing on which discipline that can answer the right questions.

We’ve been able to live on every continent we can think about from our first sight of light. We are able to think and do the vocal talking dance, up the wazoo. We have to get back to Darwin and his great theory of evolution, which is one of the greatest contributions that’s ever been made to science. It all started along when he started to do some writings in his book called “The Origin of Species”. But it was in “The Descent of Man” he first stated his theory of evolution that Homo Sapiens is a privitive monkeyish animal. Darwin’s theories were a drawback. They were considered to be offensive, blasphemous and against Gods creatures. In “The Origin of Species”, he states that “all life is a continuous struggle in which only the fittest can survive.”. In other words, you’d think that when you are in the struggle for survival, the one being strongest and fittest, will win in the end. They win because of their adapting skills in new environments. One thing is sure – they’ll manage.

Then we go. Homo Erectus was the first member of the great genus Homo. The first Homo standing up. It is, of course, an extinct hominid that lived between 1.6 million and 250.000 years ago. You can never be exact with them numbers, eh? Homo Erectus has been thought to be evolved in Africa from Homo Habilis, which is outbred from paranthropus boisei, which is an early hominin (going on australopithecine. Think hominini tribe. Think again, ardipithecus genus. Human taxonomy is interesting indeed). But if you go into its and bits, anatomically and physiologically through Homo Erectus, you will see that they will resemble contemporary of todays humans, with an exception for a stouter bone structure. Who’d know, eh? Homo Sapiens walking around the streets with stouty bonies. If you show me, I’d give _you_ a dime for my happiness! But if we went for Leakeys thoughts of this, we might see one, and we might don’t even bother to give that funky guy walking around a reaction. You do get mental images of the Hollywood making of the “Encino Man” (or “California Man”, if you want to), eh? Hehe!) They also have a, whatever you’d call it, a normal sized braincase, which is about 850 – 1000 cc that will approach us with good compareness, so to speak, Homo Sapiens. Their cranial bones are, though, more massive than ours and Homo Habilis. Ain’t that bad for walking around knockin’ ‘em skulls around every tree they see.

And for that, Homo Habilis is said to be the first Homo. Findings are said to be so. That Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus were found to be living in the same century. They just didn’t like living together and weren’t comfortable of that. Well, yes. Like chimpanzees and apes. Theories, theories, theories.

Just to quote Morris; It might, very well, be that Homo Erectus was a true man, indeed, but that he might have been degenerate in both size and culture, and that’s possibly because of inbreeding (flowers and bees ain’t much of rocket science), and poor diet and a hostile environment (Gish, which had the first word on that Homo Erectus was human). Just look away from the braincase, skeleton (which are one about the limit). So. He was wrong. Homo Erectus differes from Homo by many aspects other than braincase. Do we know? Do we know anything of these? Do we know any thing specific about their culture (yes, did they have a culture? Of course! Everyone living in a pack has it own culture!)? Just to point out what Talking Origins are saying about this. Interesting stuff. Okay, one time, a group of archaeologists led by Richard Leakey, found a fossil of a nine (or whatever. Underaged, at least. Homo Erectus developed heck of a lot faster than us, ain’t rocket science, since they were firstly straight off the origin of monkeydonkeys. Those mammals, do, well, yeah, mature faster. Why? You figure out yourself, or this, is going to be a very, very long post …) year old boy. This boy, is called the “Turkana boy”, or “Nariokotome boy”, if you want to. Well. This kid was hominid. He died 1.6 million years ago. His brain size was 880 cc, and would have been estimated to be around 910 cc when adult (where we’d have a brain size for about 1350 cc). He was about as tall as me, around 160 cm, and it was also estimated that he’d reach around 185 cm. This kid looked very, very similar to our group of kids, but they found that he has a big hole in his vertebrae (a irregular bone near something called the ischis). Where his spinal cords went, he only had around half of the cross sections that we do. This means that he lack the thorax that we have, so we can speak fluently.

So, well, later, Morris (said by Rickard Leakey) states that the Turkana boy would walk through our streets today without any thoughts and remarks from us with him being another specie of Homo. Then, later, Morris took his quote (by Leakey and Walker), well, very out of context, and stated that he could walk around _unnoticed_ covered in suitable clothes, a cap, well, to obscure his low forehead and beetle brow, then he would, probably, oh yes. Mark it. _Probably_, walk around unnoticed again … hey, is this evolution or variability, you think …? Gee.

Then Richard Leakey spoke a little about his great findings, and states through National Geographic that this finding, was well. In other words. Very, very cool.
“I think [the Turkana Boy] is remarkable because it’s so complete, but perhaps another aspect that is often overlooked is that many people who don’t like the idea of human evolution have been able to discount much of the work that we’ve done on the basis that it’s built on fragmentary evidence. There have just been bits and pieces, and who knows, those little bits of bone could belong to anything. To confront some of these people with a complete skeleton that is human and is so obviously related to us in a context where it’s definitely one and a half million years or even more is fairly convincing evidence, and I think many of the people who are fence-sitters on this discussion about creationism vs. evolution are going to have to get off the fence in the light of this discovery.”

So, is there anything to say about this? Jumping front and forward through everything. We should stick to what the topic of today states. Homo Neanderthalis versus Homo Sapiens. Yes, okay, not totally off the edge. We’re also taking their subspecies with us.

Would a kind of interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalis result in sterility? Go on for Darwin and his “Origin of Species” (a must read too, by the way!). We do find out that intercrossing plants and such, will, whenever, result in some sterility. A F1 and with hybrids in such, there will be a 50-50 way to go on with the sterility. I doubt it will be absolute, but genes are cool that way. Playing with them, makes you play in a russian roulette. A H.S. x H.N. mating where both have male and female, with two more males and females, which are sired by another male, will give eight offsprings. These offsprings, will be 4-1/2 siblings to each other. If these eight offsprings were sterile, there would be no preserved H.N. DNA in their future generations. But are we sure they were sterile at all? Of course, not. We do see where we envolved from. A mitochondrial DNA is recorded to be longer within an unbroken chain of cellsharing. The mitochondrion in mtDNA, is, though, estimated to also contain about 2-10 mtDNA copies in each pair. This means it is coded to be nuclear DNA don’t originally originate bacterials, having to be transfered through the eukaryotic nucleus through evolution. Le Femme plays a big part in this game of mating and sharing. MtDNA is inherited by Le Femme maternally with dilutions, but is often destroyed when the egg is fertilized. Though, it is said that we can go ten generations backwards to break a chain to this date, then there would be a 11 % and even 34 % possibility of a breakage of the chain. Highly doubted that we can trace a person off the street today back to H.N. as a relative. We could go on and on with this, but please, don’t fall asleep yet! Genetic genealogy is sweet to the marrow.

The Neanderthalis were said to gone to exctincion because their big game of feed couldn’t grass for grazing anymore. The Homo Sapiens also suffered the loss, but we’re not at extincion. We were smart enough to go out fishing (which the Neanderthalis man did a bit later …), getting small game, like rabbits and birdies. The questions were asked. Why didn’t the Neanderthalis adapt culturally like us, and get Peter the Bunny for food instead? They later say that we were able to store our food. There is absolutely no evidence that Neanderthalis could not. Were they stupid? Were they slow? Were they lazy? Or just thinking wisely, first come, first serve? Or did they just die of the lack of speech or the close contact they had when hunting big game (oh noes! Where they killed by the big mammal? Could they get help? Oh noes! And, well, anyway … back to the back and all that)? So many questions to ask, but never a correct answer to get. Just theories. And theories are good. With theories, the world goes forward, because Homo Sapiens are curious species. Are there any plausible hypothesises in this at all?