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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5175659" data-attributes="member: 2205">Oh, me too.  That's why looking at a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry and making sure that they all tell the same story.Which, in this case, they don't clearly.Ironically, those who favor a separate species (instead of subspecies) did it based on prior mtDNA studies, which showed no evidence of genetic interaction.  Papers by Pennisi (Science 323 (5916) 2009), Green and Briggs, et. al (EMBO Journal 28(17) 2009) find no such evidence in the Neanderthal genome project.So, like I said, I think the linked article here is interesting and intriguing, but it's not a slam-dunk.  It's just one piece of the puzzle.Lieberman, Pearson and Mowbray, "Basicranial Influence on overall crianial shape," Human Evolution 38 (2) 291-315, 1999.Plus, I'm talking about relative frequency.  And the occipital buns of Homo sampiens sapiens are only superficially similar to that of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.  And the presence of them is relatively high on populations that couldn't ever have had any contact with Neanderthals, even according to this article, like South African bushmen.I think it's (at best) a hard sell to say that because you can feel a knot at the back of your head, you inherited that from a Neanderthal ancestor.  That's just not a compelling story.  It being an unrelated convergent feature related to space allocation of the brain, especially in dolicocephalic individuals, seems much more likely.And just because you've held a few specimens doesn't mean that it wasn't more common in archaic AMH (anatomically modern humans.)  You've gotta do a census of hundreds of finds (at least) to do that.  And those censuses have been done.  And they were more common in archaic AMH than in later AMH.Yeah, but we're talking about on the ice sheet.  Hundreds of miles from any source of food whatsoever.They didn't live in Denmark or Finland or any place like that when it was miles under the ice.The latest surviving Neanderthal fossils are found Gibraltar and Portugal from about 24,000 years ago, not icy climates.  Although that's not quite as solid as we'd like and the interpretation is a bit controversial, and the next youngest are from Croatia about 32,000 years ago.</blockquote>

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