A New Year’s Message…and Plea

Latest research shows that present day humans are between one and four percent Neanderthal. Seems like there was some interbreeding going on in the Middle East between very early (Neanderthal) and later (Cro-Magnon) beings moving out of Africa, a critical fact recently uncovered. I say beings because these species were not fully human, in that their consciousness was not fully developed. They lacked traits that make us human, like compassion, empathy, emotinal sensitivity, love, cognitive reasoning, understanding, and a full language set. Early theories had Neanderthals going extinct before there was any contact with Cro-Magnons. That means since Cro-Magnons were a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens sapiens (that’s us), we have some Neanderthal in our gene pool. The Neanderthal was a brutish, muscular fellow, with little or no language, who resorted to cannibalism and stripping the skin off the nearby dead, who lived in caves and hunted the mammoth with very sharp stone spears. He had fire, and could control it to a degree, and there is limited evidence that he lived within nuclear families. His lifespan was about 30 years. His torso was that of a present-day weight lifter, with powerful arms that hung down close to his kness. He was a dull witted fellow but there is evidence that he traded with others. And now we think that he interbred with genetically more advanced species in the Middle East before the Neanderthals went west to Europe and another group east to Asia. So to have Neanderthal genes might explain a certain coarseness, a certain predatory instinct, and

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