Talk:Amud 1

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Extremely biased article

This article is slanted in favor of the opinion that Amud 1 is a "Neanderthal" -- and nothing more. It reads as if the author is nagged by a creeping paranoia that the public might actually think the skull didn't belong to a "pure" Neanderthal. In fact, it even contained outright falsehoods in support of this idea, such as Amud 1 having "large teeth"; something not corroborated by any anthropologist who has ever studied this specimen. And then there's this gem of a statement:

"In 1995, Hovers et al. argued that its cranial and mandibular particularities made it fully Neanderthal,[9] and although rejected by Belfer-Cohen (1998), this is now the accepted classification."

^ Good luck finding me the skull classification committee that authorized that outrageous statement. Actually, geneticists have been telling us that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred in the middle east 47k-65k years ago,^[1] which fits pretty well with the ESR dating of Amud 1. Looks like Belfer-Cohen had it right.

Also, this:

"Though Neanderthal skulls are usually more voluminous than modern human ones, some prehistoric anatomically modern human skulls had bigger brains than Amud 1. Fossils include La Barma Grande 2 and Grotte de Enfants 4, who have cranial capacities of 1880 cc and 1780 cc, respectively, and South African Boskop Man had cranial capacity between 1,700 and 2,000 cc.³.^[2]}}"

has been removed. The insecurity and desperation for attention in that statement reads like something a frustrated male house cat would say, if cats could speak English. Does it make people feel uncomfortable to know that a Neanderthal (more likely, a Neanderthal-modern human hybrid) has the biggest brain in the archaic hominid fossil record? Furthermore, these skulls were highly fragmentary, including missing entire segments of bone such as the temporal bone, lending only wildly fluctuating estimations of their size, and the Boskop skulls in particular are shrouded in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in such a way that no prestigious article would ever mention them, except perhaps for comic relief or as an example of what not to be, you know, like the Boy Scout pamphlets or the 1950s "Institute for American Democracy" Superman posters.

Hunan201p (talk) 04:53, 12 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
^ Vandermeersch, Bernard (1981). Les hommes fossiles de Qafzeh (Israël). Paris: Éditions du CNRS. p. 141. ISBN 978-2222028277.

[1] ttps://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

[2] Vandermeersch, Bernard (1981). Les hommes fossiles de Qafzeh (Israël). Paris: Éditions du CNRS. p. 141. ISBN 978-2222028277.

[1]

[2]