| Humans coughed Neanderthals to death |
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| The History of Life on Earth |
Charlotte Houldcroft believes that her ancestors infected the Neanderthals to extinction after having sex with
them. Naïve as she is, Charlotte first swallowed the amusing theory that humans slept with and had hybrid
babies with Neanderthals, a theory that is pushed by deluded individuals such as Trinkaus and Paabo. She
doesn't even question such hogwash. She simply accepts it on the basis of their authority. She's already at
the next level: building a theory on this ridiculous foundation.
Charlotte extrapolates that in the process of having sex with our cousins, our forefathers also passed on
lethal bugs to them. After all, she probably reasons (ha, ha, ha!), the Conquistadors passed on smallpox to
the Aztecs and look where the Aztecs are now...
Mmmmhhh... some 100 or so million of them, I believe...
Yeah. Something doesn't seem right. The Aztecs never became extinct. Diseases never wiped out a single
species in the history of life on Earth.
Nevertheless, smallpox is a crowd disease. It never happened to low density hunter-gatherers. Individuals
may have died of bugs and worms like Salmonella, Tetanus, and Trichinosis, normally after eating some
contaminated animal. Or maybe a mosquito injected Yellow Fever or Malaria into one individual in the clan
who then passed it on to a couple of others. Or maybe the entire clan drank rotten water and died of
Cholera. Would this local mechanism exterminate the clans on the other side of Europe?
So what is Charlotte's line of reasoning (ha, ha, ha)? How does she get around this sticky point?
Charlotte argues that:
- "it is unlikely to have been similar to Columbus bringing disease into America and
decimating native populations. It’s more likely that small bands of Neanderthals each
had their own infection disasters, weakening the group and tipping the balance against
survival"
In other words, dear Charlotte -- bless her heart, she does try hard to think -- glossed over the problem
altogether and never gave it any 'deep' thought. How could she? She barely has the skills to do house
chores... What is this girl doing in a university, anyway? What did she give in return to obtain her degree?
Charlotte even failed to grasp the basic notion that, in the best of cases, it was exclusively the Neanderthal
males who slept with our unfaithful women. Three mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies turned out negative.
( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) Since in primates mtDNA is inherited from the mother and humans carry no Neanderthal
mtDNA, it means that our forefathers were not that blind or stupid. In the best of cases it was our horny
foremothers who were blind and unfaithful, or just wanted to make their brutish men jealous so that they
would pay more attention to them than to their spears and to the hunt.
Silly spider! If only Charlotte would tend to her web and leave the thinking to people who can do more than
wash dishes and scrub the floors...
Charlotte's web of nonsense Humans drove Neanderthals to extinction by infecting them with Syphilis. |
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| To comment on any of the pages in this website go to: Rational Scientific Method |
| The History of Life on Earth |
| O The Paleo Establishment's main theories regarding the extinction of the Neanderthals Love War Climate Volcano Disease Trade How Woolly died |
- Now, in Charlotte's defense, there are Neanderthals bones and skeletons that exhibit arthritis.
Hmmmm...
On second thought, though, arthritis is not a contagious disease. So I guess that wraps it up for the
disease lobby.
The intriguing question nevertheless persists... Who authorized the publication of her paper? How can
Charlotte publish her nonsense and the journals claim that they don't have editorial space for rational
theories?
I guess the answer lies in that people like Trinkaus and Paabo serve as reviewers on the secret peer
review boards.