(urth) The problem of Cthulhu

[brunians at brunians.org]

> On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, brunians at brunians.org wrote:

>> I don't engage too much in the debate. I got my ideas, they're not
>> currently well-accepted, I believe that they will be pretty soon (though
>> possibly not within my lifetime).

>> To me, the question is basically whether Plato, Snorre Sturluson and the
>> Mahabharata are more or less reliable than a bunch of twentieth and
>> early twenty-first century theoreticians. That's a no-brainer.

> The problem is that the scanty mitochondrial DNA evidence says they did
> not contribute to any modern human populations.

Remember African Eve? Don't hear too much about her anymore.

The reason you don't is because after they presented their paper, someone
went over their evidence and pointed out that it was messed up: that it is
true that they could trace each sample to their posited African Eve, or
they could work the same sample a slightly different way and come up with
other Eves, both in and out of Africa.

In other words, I don't have any problem at all with out understanding of
the DNA evidence, mitochondrial or otherwise, being incomplete or poorly
understood.

I'll believe we are getting sort of a handle on DNA when someone can
splain to me this unfolding trick that you do to get from a fertilized
cell to a human or a crow or whatever.

What I have a problem with is two human populations living side by side ad
engaging in no fuckery.

>                                               It seems not impossible
> to me that they could have interbred.  I don't know whether hobbits could
> interbreed with humans either, even though they may have coexisted more
> recently than Neandertals.

My position is that they never did die out but bred in with the dominant
population. My evidence is the literally thousands of Norwegians,
Polynesians, Australian natives and others who have obvious neanderthal
characteristics, thick bones, browridges etc.

It wouldn't surprise me if the hobbitses didn't die out either.



.