Neanderthal-Mammoth Study Latest Hint that Evidence for Neanderthals Interbreeding with Humans is Overstated

I confess to being somewhat of a contrarian when I think the conventional wisdom is being unwise. On the issue of the similarity between Neanderthals and humanity the conventional "wisdom" has become downright silly. And intense. There seems to be an avalanche of what I consider propaganda- because it is so poorly supported by evidence- that Neanderthals were "so much like us". This is combined with an unrelenting effort to spread the definition of "human" to include other hominids like Neanderthals. This campaign is propped up by numerous claims about their abilities which torture the evidence to support such a conclusion.

I also think the evidence for human (Homo Sapiens) - Neanderthal admixture is very much over-stated. I don't say it never happened but I think it rarely happened and when it did failed to produce successful lines of descent. Look, lions and tigers are very different kinds of big cats. Even moreso leopards and lions. Yet they have been known to produce offspring and the females of such unions are often fertile. Yet nature tends to punish such admixture as if she was trying to fix a mistake. The fertility rate is far lower and the genetic disease rate much higher than when they mate true to type.

One of the points made in the link in the previous paragraph is that there are other explanations besides interbreeding for why humans who lived in places where Neanderthals lived have similar gene mutations to Neanderthals. Now comes this article based from this study

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The article points out that both Mammoths and Neanderthals were supposed to be cold-weather-adapted versions of their kind. The article indicates that when scientists looked for mutations in genes which would make the creature better adapted to cold weather that both species had similar mutations! Obviously this is not because they were breeding with each other. It is because they shared the same environment and this produced genetic convergence. Why isn't it considered that convergence also produced the similarity in Neanderthals and humans who moved into Eurasia (and thus shared the same environment with them)? There is no sign of interbreeding in mtDNA from mothers or Y-DNA from fathers. The similar mutations between humans and neanderthals are in nuclear DNA, but there are other ways besides interbreeding to get these similarities.

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