There truly is, apparently, an iPhone app for everything. Including from the Smithsonian Institution that lets you see what your Neaderthal ancestors may have looked like.
There truly is, apparently, an iPhone app for everything. Including this new one from the Smithsonian Institution that lets you see what your Neaderthal ancestors may have looked like.
The Christian Science Monitor has the ugly details of the Me-anderthal app:
First you upload a portrait of your face and line up the image with markers for the eyes, nose and mouth. Next, you choose which human species you’d like to become, including: Homo floresiensis who lived between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago; Homo neanderthalensis who lived 200,000 to 28,000 years ago; and Homo heidelbergensis who lived 700,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Expect your nose to inch up in size in the resulting MEanderthal image.
“Neandertal faces tend to have much bigger noses,” said Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Human Origins Program. “Big noses were good for humidifying and warming glacial, ice age air.”
It’s so easy a caveman could do it, so we ran a random photo through the Me-aderthal iPhone app just to see what would happen.
The Neanderthals may have died out 30,000 years ago, but scientists now believe their genes live on in modern man. We are absolutely convinced that Neanderthals still walk among us. Getting elected to Congress. So easy a caveman could do it.
Heavy brow, small brain, stocky body. Hmmmm. Is it possible that Neanderthals still live among us?
The Neanderthals may have died out 30,000 years ago, but scientists now believe their genes live on in modern man.
The New York Times has the story:
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.
Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.
Blah-blah-blah. Enough scientific stuff. Let’s get to the sex.
A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the two species overlapped there for some 15,000 years, from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.
We are highly-trained paleontologists and geneticists here at IHateTheMedia.com and we are absolutely convinced that Neanderthals still walk among us.
Getting elected to Congress. So easy a caveman could do it.
