Don't insult Neanderthals. They were the first real carers.

[Joe Chi Minh]

Here's a fascinating snippet from today's (UK) Daily Mirror:

NEANDERTHALS were no heartless brutes but cared deeply about each other, scientists said yesterday.

Researchers found groups living in Europe betwen 500,000 and 40,000 years ago took care of their sick or wounded for years.

Hunting and eating together also helped develop a sense of compassion, the University of York team found.

Remains revealed how a Neanderthal child with a congenital brain abnormality was not abandoned but lived until five or six years old.

Another showed a primitive human with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye was cared for for up to 20 years.

Dr Penny Spikins, who led the study, said: "Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion."

I'm not saying anything ... about the right wing.

[mike_c]

1. further evidence that republicans are not actually human....

I'm just sayin'.

[jimlup]

9. You're sayin that Homo Repulicanus is a misnomer?

It should be ignoramus republicanus...

[Xipe Totec]

2. That's probably why they got run over by Homo Sapiens Sapiens,

Who, apparently, developed a highly successful mutation, the NGAF gene.

Holders of this dominant gene are able to watch a neighbor's house burn to the ground and just Not Give A Fuck.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. NGAF gene.

Excellent.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. It's usually paired with WGAF

Who Gives A Fuck.

But, there are many other such genes, all of them dominant.

--d!

[Surya Gayatri]

7. word! +1! n/t

[aquart]

3. The right wing? Were you here for Pay to Spray?

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. What do you mean?

[Tutankhamun]

6. As for what wiped out the Neanderthals, I'm partial to the hypothesis

that states it was their thicker, more muscular body style that wiped them out. They were unable to run/walk long distances for hunting purposes. They therefore couldn't adapt to changing climatic conditions.

Of course, there's a good chance changing climate will do in H. Sapiens as well. The difference being that we are causing the climate change that will soon do us in.

[bhikkhu]

10. I think it was even simpler than that

If you consider how ruthlessly most humans hate and persecute any subgroup of themselves that is even slightly different, especially when the going gets a little rough...just ask the Jews, or Mexicans, or Blacks, or Native Americans, or Irish, or Italians, or whoever, backwards or forwards or sideways in history there is no end and scarceley a breather to the hatred.

Whether we out-competed them and then exterminated them, or just exterminated them, would be the one question.

[roguevalley]

11. I hold to the outbred by the newbies theory. I loved them. They

had much larger brains than us and that might have been a factor in their birth rates.