Neanderthals and modern humans diverged at least 800,000 years ago, research

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This is much older than previously thought:

There goes the 500,000 year old bottleneck conjecture.

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500 kya I don’t think was a hypothesis in the traditional sense but a lower limit based upon our best measurements/calculations.

None the less you can still have the first ‘Homo sapiens’ being within 500 kya if you do the demarcation line trick. So that is Neanderthals split from our ancestors that weren’t demarcated as Homo sapiens yet! (Note this could be wrong but it’s how I understood one argument that @swamidass made).

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That’s about right @pevaquark. Though that is only considering TMR4A. I’m advising people like WLC to develop a clear theological approach to deal with interbreeding, lest they are caught off guard.

@Patrick the paper in the OP is very weak evidence. In hominid evolition there is often mosaics Individuals in the past, with attributes that only later segregate into distinct linages. Regardless, once we move back to 500 Kya, I can’t see any valid objection to moving back to 700 Kya. The really interesting thing about people who take this tact, they are essentially taking all of Genesis as mythical except one detail. I’m still not clear how to make sense of the logic behind this position.

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I think our species comes into existence roughly 300,000 years ago. Then around the 40,000 years ago mated with Neanderthals. How does these facts fit in?

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“human” in theology doesn’t correspond with a taxonomic category like “species.” You can’t draw a correspondence like this.

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oh, sorta like “kinds”:sunglasses:

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No, sort of like how scientists usethe term “human”, with no correspondence to taxonomy.

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yes, I see one characteristic of being human is upright walking going back millions of years. Human is really a very undefined term. Hard to draw a line between human and non-human in history.

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@swamidass

I agree totally.

In fact, I’m sort of eager for the first Creationist to even attempt it!!!

That will go over like a projectile vomit on a church balcony! This Neanderthal has the image of God… but not this group over here.

And “kind” apparently includes Neanders with Sapiens… isn’t it obvious?

Oh… and the farming the first couple learned in Eden?.. well, they forgot all about it …

And it took hundreds of thousands of years (and a few ice ages which are NOT mentioned in the OT) to finally get farming up and running!

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Weak on several grounds. There is far less reason to think there is a consistent “tooth morphology” clock than a DNA clock.

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