Anne:
Thank you for your charitable comments and for not jumping on me over the examples I chose in order to illustrate my point that a Neandertal genetic contribution to the modern gene pool would be so slight that it would be result in isolated characteristics, of which some might be physically visible and some might be expressed only in obscure behavioral ways that would probably never be definitively identified. I see, by the fact that buttons were included to modify or delete my comment, that these examples were not received entirely in the spirit I intended.
I meant no disparagement of unfortunate people with short attention spans and/or quick tempers or of those with red hair. I chose these examples because they were handy and could be expressed concisely. Before I go on, Let me root through the box of uncatalogued articles I’ve collected as possible ways to promote verisimilitude in the Neandertal-Cro-Magnon adventure novel I’m writing, and also let me expand briefly on these controversial and complicated issues. Bear in mind that in each case other researchers have disagreed.
Here is where I got my admittedly simplistic ideas. “Neandedrtals ‘R’ We,”
www.research.ukans.edu/explore/v1n2/neander.html informs us that David Frayer and others consider it quite thinkable that there’s a bit of Neandertal genetic material in us. Red or ginger hair was posited by Rosalind Harding as reported in “Redheads are Neanderthal,”www.thetimes.co.uk/article/),,2-115198,00.html. (Please don’t blame me if some of these strange-looking URLs do not work; I’m transcribing them carefully.) ADHD has been attributed, though IMHO not plausibly, to Neandertals in “The Neandertal Theory,”
www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm). Neandertal’s quick tempers were posited in “Behaving Like Neandertals,”
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31521-2002Apr22.html.
As I said, I seized on these ideas because they could be concisely allude to in my comment, not because I was trying to advocate them. Now let me try to pick a more positive, though less explicit, example of how a dilute Neandertal genetic contribution could be expressed non-morphologically in hard-to-pin-down mental characteristics. To this end I will focus on left-handedness. Again, remember that I am not advocating these ideas; I’m just illustrating a point.
About 11 percent of modern people are left-handed: “Linkage and Lefties,”
www.nature.com/nature/view/021003.html. “Left-Handedness: Curse, Blessing or Anomaly of Nature,”
www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/1684/lefthand.html points out that the right half of the brain is the center where the visual, spatial and intuitive processes are directed, whereas the left half controls language, logic, and linear thinking. “Study suggests one gene separates right-handers from lefties,”
www.augustachronicle.com/stories/073097/fea gene.html (note that this URL, rightly or wrongly, includes a blank space)
cites Amar J.S. Klar’s conclusion that people who have the gene he calls RGHT “are right-handed and those without it have a 50-50 chance of being either right-handed or left-handed. “Study: Left-handers have different brains,”
Http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/healthscience/134415110 left05.html (note the URL has another of those annoying blanks) posits that “People who grow up left-handed have a different, more flexible brain structure than those born to take lie by the right hand,” and that “There reallyh is a difference in brains that results a more symmetric brain in left-handers, where the two side are more equal.” “Being Left-Handed,”
www.his.com/~pshapiro/left.handed.html points out that some of history’s most creative minds have been left-handed, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Bobby Fischer, Bob Kylan, Paul McCaartney, and Wynton Marsalis [it does not list right-handed geniuses, he he]. “Are there psychotic Neanderthals amongst us?” http:cogprints.ecssoton.ac.uk/archive/00000060/00/crow.htm points out that J.T. crow has a different explanation the Sklar for laterization and cerebral dominance, feeling that it comes from an autosomal gene that is X-Y homologous and that the responsible speciation event took place in Homo sapiens, which he obviously equates with AMHs, about 50,000 years ago, which would exclude Neandertals (all this is bound up in his theory of language). Further, I read omewhere, and I can’t find it in my rat’s nest, that the scratches on Neandertals’ incisors, from cutting off hunks of meat, indicate that left-handedness was more prevalent among them than in modern people.
All this could be taken (stretch …. stretch … wait for it) to suggest that some of the more flexible thinkers and more creative people among us could have received that gift as a result of the Neandertals’ contribution to the modern gene pool.
Why didn’t I use this example in place of the rather pejorative-sounding ones that I resorted to? Because it takes too long to postulate it.
In choosing more facile examples, I certainly did not mean to disparage anyone. My point was simply that the Neandertal genetic contribution, while probably faint if it exists at all, could still express itself in our modern-day physical and mental makeup in ways that are hard to detect and impossible to ascribe with any certainty.
Nya! Now can I join the circus?
