Pääbo and Habermehl

Both published papers on Neanderthals in 2010.

Anne Habermehl published hers ... January:

Answers Research Journal 3 (2010):1–21.
www.answersingenesis.org/arj/v3/enigmatic-neanderthals.pdf

Pääbo published his in ... May:

A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome
(Of several authors, Richard E. Green is mentioned first and Svante Pääbo last)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5100745/

Published in final edited form as:
Science. 2010 May 7; 328(5979): 710–722.

In other words, when Anne Habermehl wrote her paper on Neanderthals, she did not yet have access to Svante Pääbo's investigation about sequencing the genome.

Yet - in a correspondence we had - she has claimed that she understood Pääbo's work as bogus, he was projecting back to Neanderthals genetic differences as observed now, absolutely not in any way shape or form actually sequenced actual DNA, Cuozzo has the final word (from 1998) over Pääbo (2010) because he studied developmental morphology (as opposed to static morphology .... however you square that with no Neanderthal skull ever being observed in growth over the years of its life by X-rays, since all Neanderthal skulls are dead.

Now, here is a little contribution to why Homo Erectus is non-human:

Consideration of this question logically leads to the conclusions of Wise, who says that since there must have been more peoples than this leaving Babel, there must be whole groups of early people who have disappeared, whether in natural catastrophe, warfare, or whatever (Wise 2005). Indeed, Wise goes as far as saying that H. erectus may have been the only humans at Babel; in his proposed scenario, Neanderthals would have possibly developed later. This raises the question whether this accords with what the Bible says in Genesis 10, where it lists a lot of different peoples, but nothing about disasters or eradicating any of them.

Also, as Wood points out, if H. erectus were human, this would also indicate that there was a wider range of physical appearance, and therefore genetic diversity, immediately after the Flood than we have today (Wood 2008). But in the view of others, there should have been less human diversity immediately after the two genetic bottlenecks of the Flood and the Babel dispersion, with diversity increasing as time went on (Ashcraft 2004; Nelson 2004).

Those problems are all solved if, like Cuozzo (1998, p. 101), we put H. erectus into the category of apes. This suggests that all the people who left Babel were Neanderthals who spread out in many directions to form the nations of Genesis 10; moreover, all peoples now living on earth are descended from Neanderthals. This theme will be developed in the next section on Neanderthal lifespan.

So - what if Homo erectus (possibly), Flores Hobbits (possibly, I'd even say probably), Heidelbergians, Atapuerca Antecessors, Denisovans and Neanderthals were all pre-Flood?

AND one other pre-Flood race, ours, came on the Ark, with some minor half caste (mixed race) contribution from Neanderthals and Denisovans through daughters in law.

This means they came before the bottle-neck, not after it.

Which means, the Flood reduced human variability, precisely as expected.

Everyone agrees that modern humans showed up on the world scene at approximately the same time that the Neanderthals disappeared; whether or not this timing was a coincidence is debated. Some evolutionists allow thousands of years for the two groups to overlap—how many thousand is a matter of intense discussion—because they have a lot of time at their disposal, and a few thousand years here or there are a mere trifle (see, for example, Lewin 1999, pp. 157, 165–166). Creationists obviously have far less historical time available to account for the Neanderthal disappearance and subsequent appearance of modern man; therefore they have to explain how this mysterious event could have happened so quickly. But the problem for both sides is the same: why did it happen?

Habermehl is in fact wrong on what "everyone agrees".

Neanderthals disappeared, carbon dated (that is misdated by inflated timeline) 30 - 40 000 years ago.

If we make it 40 000 years, that gives me a carbon date for the Flood to be compared to the real, Biblical date. And therefore a carbon level at Flood.

Obviously, if Gorham cave of Gibraltar contains any actual bodyparts of Neanderthals (whether skulls or teeth) and not just Mousterian tools, the carbon date would be the later dates of Gorham level IV, which is a considerably more recent carbon date, a considerably higher carbon level at the Flood and therefore also some perspective of calibrating in detail C14 for pre-Flood times, which I had left out of reckoning as unrealistic. To me, any carbon date 40 000 - 70 000 (or 65 000, if that is the limit) simply means "pre-Flood" and I am so far not trying any calibration of what pre-Flood years. So, Anno Mundi 2242, was the carbon level 1.45 pmC, meaning we date the 5000 years and add the 35 000 "instant years" to get an inflated date of 40 000 years?

Or was the level 11.333 pmC, meaning we date the 5000 years and add only 18 000 "instant age" years, to get an inflated date of 23 000 BP, as per latest dates in Gorham level IV?

Level III	Level IV
8	0	Number of AMS Dates <24 kyr bp
0	22	Number of AMS dates >24 kyr bp
10800	23040	Youngest Date (lower 95% confidence limit)
18600	33340	Oldest Date (upper 95% confidence limit)
0	103	Number of mousterian artefacts present
240	0	Number of upper Palaeolithic artefacts present
Omitting ratios I don't know the use of.

Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar—The persistence of a Neanderthal population
http://www.ugr.es/~grupo179/pdf/finlayson%202008.pdf

In the latter case, one would actually have an interest in making similar calibrations for pre-Flood timeline (5199 - 2957 BC) as I have so far done exclusively for post-Flood (from 2957 BC especially to 2015, birth of Abraham, to some extent also even up to 1510, Exodus).

For my part, as long as I am not told explicitly that Gorham level IV contains actual Neanderthal bodily remains, I'll take it as post-Flood and Neanderthals as pre-Flood and Noah's family as visiting and doing or collecting Mousterian tools.

Now, why would modern man NOT have been a pre-Flood race, along Neanderthals?

Everyone agrees that modern humans showed up on the world scene at approximately the same time that the Neanderthals disappeared.

No, Evolutionists don't agreee on that.

They say modern humans turned up in Europe a few millennia before Neanderthals disappeared. Tool styles and art styles like Aurignacian, Magdalenian, Gravettian all turn up in Europe c. 40 000 ...

Aurignacien
Répartition géographique	Europe, Moyen-Orient, Asie centrale, Altaï
Période	Paléolithique supérieur
Chronologie	de 43 000 à 29 000 AP
Gravettien
Répartition géographique	Europe - Sibérie
Période	Paléolithique supérieur
Chronologie	31 000 à 22 000 ans AP
Solutréen
Répartition géographique	Ouest du Rhône et sud de la Seine en France, Espagne, Portugal
Période	Paléolithique supérieur
Chronologie	environ 22 000 à 17 000 avant le présent
Magdalénien
Répartition géographique	Europe occidentale et centrale
Période	Paléolithique supérieur
Chronologie	Environ 17 000 à 12 000 avant le présent

However, they also say that modern humans were around well before turning up in Europe.

Homo sapiens idaltu (Afar: Idaltu; "elder" or "first born"[1]), also called Herto Man,[1] is the name given to a number of hominin fossils found in 1997 in Herto Bouri, Ethiopia. They date to around 160,000 years ago.[2]

Paleoanthropologists determined that the skeletal finds belong to an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens which lived in Pleistocene Africa since the fossils possess some archaic cranial traits that are uncommon among anatomically modern humans. They also generally lack the derived features of classic Neanderthals. Homo sapiens idaltu are morphologically similar to both archaic African fossils and subsequent anatomically modern humans of the Late Pleistocene.

Because of their early dating and unique physical characteristics, they were believed to represent the immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans, as suggested by the Out-of-Africa theory.[1][3] The oldest anatomically modern human fossils (315,000 years old) discovered at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, have since been dated to nearly twice the age of the Herto fossils.

Why do I bother about Herto man or Jebel Irhoud being dated 160 or 315 millennia ago? They are not carbon dates, after all? And I mainly consider Potassium Argon dates as bogus or hazard game, right?

Well, Habermehl was talking of how "Everyone agrees that modern humans showed up on the world scene at approximately the same time that the Neanderthals disappeared" and she is including Evolutionists since she is talking, a) of "everybody" and b) specifically of how Evolutionists debate the millennia of coexistence.

Citing (the very biassed) Timeline of human evolution
130–80 ka	Marine Isotope Stage 5 (Eemian).
	Modern human presence in Southern Africa and West Africa.[47] Appearance of mitochondrial haplogroup (mt-haplogroup) L2.
80–50 ka	MIS 4, beginning of the Upper Paleolithic.
	Early evidence for behavioral modernity.[48] Appearance of mt-haplogroups M and N. Southern Dispersal migration out of Africa, Proto-Australoid peopling of Oceania.[49] Archaic admixture from Neanderthals in western Eurasia, from Denisovans in East and Southeast Asia,[50][51] and from an unspecified "basal western African" lineage and other "deeply divergent" archaic humans in Sub-Saharan Africa.[52]
50–25 ka
	Behavioral modernity develops, according to the "great leap forward" theory.[53] Extinction of Homo floresiensis[54] M168 mutation (carried by all non-African males). Appearance of mt-haplogroups U and K. Peopling of Europe, peopling of the North Asian Mammoth steppe. Paleolithic art. Extinction of Neanderthals and other archaic human variants (with possible survival of hybrid populations in Asia and Africa. Appearance of Y-Haplogroup R2; mt-haplogroups J and X.

For my part, I think modern men and Neanderthals coexisted for much of latter half if not all of the 2242 years before the Flood. They diverged, whether simply by genetic drift and if so, how far was Adam from modern human and to Neanderthal or Denisovan, or by a genetic experiment gone wrong.

The "genetic experiment" idea comes from Pääbo's observation that mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals are half way between man and chimp.

But it is also possible, genetic divergence started out with a higher potential before the Flood, spanning "modern" as well as Neanderthal and Denisovan, and the carbon dates 55 to 40 millennia ago reflect the part of the pre-Flood world - Europe and perhaps Asia - where Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon were living together, mainly on Neanderthal terms.

And, Neanderthals are visible in remains, while Nodians are not, because they lived like today some Amerindians, in the sense of lacking agriculture and so on.

Genesis 6:[7] He said: I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth, from man even to beasts, from the creeping thing even to the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them.

Would it be against this verse, as Anne Habermehl argues, if any remains remain as bones, found in caves or sedimentary layers? I don't think so. A cave or a mudlayer (later hardening to sediment) by definition is no longer on the face of the earth. And the life is destroyed by death, even if bones remain.

I do think that if she would like to exclude this, arguing like only Hadean layers are from Flood (there was some time since I looked up her tables on matching Biblical real chronology with, simply, secular or conventional), then the major part of "geological column" (which she reckons with) will be post-Flood and so if no single disaster, at least successive disasters together would have left more sediment than the Flood. Which is an inconvenience.

I therefore, while deploring that Mr Pääbo is Evolutionist (but congratulations to his marriage!) find his work on Neanderthal DNA very interesting, and that partly due tothe fact we do share some Neanderthal DNA and partly the fact this is never from Y chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA, suggesting we are both patrilinearly and matrilinearly cut off from Neanderthals, as would be the case if the relevant genome had passed through a daughter in law of Noah (passing on no Y chromosome, since a female) who was Neanderthal on either father's or a grandfather's side, thereby excluding the Neanderthal genome also from being a carrier of mitochondrial DNA.

Meanwhile, I don't know exactly what parts of Neanderthal morphology and developmental morphology which are explained exclusively by the DNA, I cannot exclude Cuozzo has some points (shared with his admirer Habermehl) about the old ages of Neanderthals. That in turn, while consistent with very early post-Flood men, would also be very consistent with pre-Flood men.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Evarist, Pope and Martyr
26.X.2018

Romae sancti Evaristi, Papae et Martyris, qui Dei Ecclesiam, sub Hadriano Imperatore, suo sanguine purpuravit.