At the time that Dr. Ian Tattersall, PhD, of the American Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, PhD, Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, published their commentary, entitled “Hominids and Hybrids: The place of Neanderthals in human evolution” in the June 22, 1999 Volume 96, Issue 13 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [17], it was a relatively simple matter for them to effectively refute any claim that was put forward of the discovery having been made of a human-Neanderthal hybrid.
Their first and foremost point of contention therefore what the fact that, then as now, Neanderthals were classified as a separate species of the Genus Homo from our own. Their task was further made easier still by the fact that the evidence of hybridization that they were refuting in their commentary was a 24,500-year-old four-year-old child.
The evidence presented in an article by Cidalia Duarte and Joao Zilhao; of the Portuguese Institute for the Management of Architectural and Archaeological Heritage; Joao Mauricio and Pedro Souto; of the Torrejana Speleological and Archaeological Society; Dr. Paul Pettitt, PhD; of the University of Sheffield; Erik Trinkaus, PhD; Professor of Physical Anthropology at Washington University; and Dr. Hans Van Der Plicht; of the University of Groningen; in “The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia” in the same Proceedings of the NAS [3] for the child in question being the end result of centuries, if not millennia of hybridization between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals fundamentally amounted to the appearance that it did not accurately match the features of modern humans.
As such, disproving the specimen as a hybrid was a simple matter of demonstrating that, as a child, the four-year old would not have been a fully matured adult specimen of the species, and as such would not have yet fully developed those features as are characteristic of our species as we now know it today.
As is shown in the publicization of the Portuguese discovery in an April 25, 1999 article by New York Times senior science correspondent John Noble Wilford; numerous experts in the field at the time concurred with the Portuguese Archaeologists’ interpretations of their find. Two of the most ardent proponents of their interpretation cited in the Times article were Dr. Fred Smith, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Illinois State University, and Dr. Milford Wolpoff, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Smith said that the Portuguese Archaeologists’ interpretations were “absolutely right” and Dr. Wolpoff said that the Portuguese discovery was “devastating” to the opposition theory of the time. In Wilford’s article, Dr. Alan Templeton, Professor of Biology at Washington University does some to explain away Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s critiques of the Portuguese specimen. Templeton explains that hybridization can occur without the effect becoming visible.
Two of the experts that Noble Wilford’s Times article cites; Dr. Chris Stringer, PhD, of the London Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Alan Mann, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania; remain unconvinced by the findings of the Portuguese Archaeologists. Even Dr. Wolpoff states that more evidence would be required in order to discern definitive evidence of hybridization. [21]
More than a decade after these articles were published, however, new evidence came to light that would make it indefinitely more difficult for Tattersall and Schwartz, or anyone else for that matter, to disprove the results of human-Neanderthal hybridization.
In a 2011 Newcomb Cleveland Prize-winning research article entitled “Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome” and a companion report, both in the Friday, May 7, 2010 Volume 328, Issue 5979 of the Journal Science, a research team; led by Dr. Svante Paabo, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Richard Green, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and David Reich, Associate Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School; found that Neanderthal and human DNA is 99.7% identical (as opposed to being 98.8% identical with Chimpanzees), inherited from a common ancestor 706,000 years ago; but also, much more significantly, that at least 4 percent of the Eurasian genome of non-Africans as far afield as Papua New Guinea is derived from Neanderthals. [5]
As reported in an article by Nicholas Wade for the New York Times, the team recovered and reconstructed 60 percent, 3.7 billion base pairs, of the Neanderthal genome [20]; which, in spite of more than a third of the 5.3 billion-letter genome remaining un-sequenced, Dr. Green is quoted by Ewen Callaway in the New Scientist as calling “pretty darn good”. [2]
The four-year Neanderthal Genome Project, the sequencing of the Neanderthal mitochondrial genome extracted from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal fossils found in 1974 in Vindija Cave near Varazdin, Croatia founded on July 20, 2006, according to a piece by Geir Moulson for the Associated Press, and completed August 7, 2008 and announced by the Max Planck Institute at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 12, 2009, involved many universities worldwide and concluded a thirteen-year pursuit by Dr. Paabo and the Max Planck Institute. [9]
Modern humans originated in Africa 200,000 years ago, and a small population of humans left Africa 50,000 years ago. From their findings, the team surmised that the interbreeding occurred in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East 45-100,000 years ago. In Europe and West Asia, Neanderthals coexisted with humans in small groups 30-50,000 years ago. Neanderthals existed from about 400,000 years ago and, as a species, the last Neanderthals fell extinct about 24,000 years ago. According to Doctor Reich in a piece by Joe Palca for NPR, modern humans and Neanderthals “overlapped between about 30,000 and 80,000 years ago”. [11]
In an article by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times [20] and a piece for MSNBC, Dr. Tattersall himself praised the Planck Institute’s research as “a fabulous achievement”. An article by Kate Wong in the May 6, 2010 Scientific American has even Dr. Wolpoff calling the research team’s findings “important evidence”. [22] In similar articles by Jennifer Pinkowski for Time Magazine [12] and by Ker Than for National Geographic [18], Dr. Trinkaus speculated that while four percent was the minimum, most modern humans probably have much more Neanderthal DNA, and that the genetic flow between Neanderthals and early humans might have been as high as “ten to twenty percent”. Than’s National Geographic piece quotes Dr. Green, in what it refers to as a “prepared statement” confirming that there was, “in all probability”, gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans. [18] Dr. Reich states in an article by Randolph Schmid from the Associated Press that there was “no indication” of the flow of genes from humans to Neanderthals. [15] An article by Robert Lee Hotz in the Wall Street Journal includes Dr. Smith questioning whether or not, with up to 5% genetic overlap, the humans and Neanderthals should continue to be considered as separate species. [8] Both a piece by Paul Rincon for BBC News [13] and its companion article by Ian Sample, PhD, for the Guardian [14], as well as Wong’s Scientific American article and Hotz’s Wall Street Journal piece [8] have Dr. Stringer as stating that the research team’s findings are a confirmation of the theory of which he was the architects, but, unlike Dr. Trinkaus, calling the discoveries “surprising”, and looking forward to what he refers as being the “next big step”, finding the functional significance of the Neanderthal genes, which the study did not address, with Dr. Green telling Callaway of the New Scientist that there was “no compelling story…that jumps out…where you say…this difference…let us write poetry instead of ,making stone tools.” [2] In Sample’s Guardian article, Dr. Green concedes that the team was unable to “speculate in any meaningful way” how Neanderthals and modern humans might have interacted on a cultural level. [14]
Dr. Green had coordinated the Neanderthal Genome Project since 2005, according to Hotz’s Wall Street Journal article [8], and had previously published an article, along with Dr. Paabo, entitled “Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA” in the November 16, 2006 Volume 444 of the Journal Nature [6]; as well as another article, also with Dr. Paabo, in the August 8, 2008 Volume 134 Issue 2 of the Journal Cell. [4]
Dr. Trinkaus is credited as having “contributed” the Portuguese Archaeologists’ paper to the National Academy on April 26, 1999. [3] Dr. Trinkaus is referred to as the most vocal proponent of the hybridization hypothesis who, according to Schmid of the Associated Press, has “long argued that Neanderthals contributed to the human genome”. [15] Trinkaus is known for also being credited with “contributing” another paper, which he also co-authored, to the National Academy on September 26, 2006; which was published in the November 14, 2006 Volume 103 Issue 46 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [16].
As publicized in a November 2, 2006 piece by Jacqui Hayes for Cosmos Magazine, Trinkaus claims the 30,000-year old cranium, shoulder blade, and leg bone of an adult human female first found in 1952 in the Cave of Pestera Muierii (“Cave of the Old Woman”) in Romania as a hybrid, reporting what he calls a “mosaic of human and Neanderthal features” in the bones. [7] Trinkaus told E.J Mundell of Healthday on October 30, 2006 that the bones were “basically modern human fossils” with characteristics that are “more similar” to what are “found in frequently in Neanderthals”, and which Trinkaus claimed were “very easy to derive from Neanderthals through some kind of interbreeding”, but were “very difficult…if not impossible” to derive from early modern humans”. [10]
Trinkaus used the same terminology to describe the Portugese find in Noble Wilford’s 1999 New York Times article, calling it a “complex mosaic” and saying that the 24,500-year-old 4-year-old is “no love child”, but the descendant of generations of hybrids. [21]
However, as with the Portugese find, according to Mundell, other experts remained unconvinced. Named in the October 30th Healthday piece is Jeffrey Laitman, PhD; Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. [10]
However, it was, of all things, Dr. Trinkaus’s response to Dr. Tattersall’s and Dr. Schwartz’s commentary on the Portuguese findings in the June 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, more than anything else, has colored this author’s opinion of the quality of Dr. Trinkaus’s character, as well as those of his colleagues. Dr. Trinkaus and Joao Zilhoao posted on the Internet on June 24, 1999 [19] what Dr. Tattersall called, in a reply dated July 10, 1999, an “intemperate, inappropriate, and inaccurate (not to mention defamatory)…ad hominem…screed” which represented a “grave abuse” of the “privilege of unfettered communication conferred by the internet.” Trinkaus’s and Zilhoao’s article portrayed Tattersall and Schwartz as “self-deluding and intellectually dishonest incompetents” with a “mission to denigrate” Neanderthals; describing their commentary an “inappropriate, inaccurate, and unethical” critique of the Portuguese archaeologists’ article, that was “replete with misinformation, misuse of cladistic and anatomical terminology, misquotes, misrepresentations, poor logic, general incompetence regarding the Late Pleistocene hominid fossil record, anatomical ignorance, and a priori non-evolutionary (typological) approaches.” Trinkaus and Zilhoao stated that Tattersall and Schwartz were “simply ignorant of the relevant aspects of the field” and “intellectually dishonest”, and that they were so “committed to their a priori point of view” that they “subconsciously distort the empirical record” to fit their views, and conclude their remarks by stating that the “gist” of Tattersall and Schwartz’s commentary was that they “don’t know what they are talking about.” In his reply, Tattersal stated that they were “hurt”, “disappointed” and “saddened” that Trinkaus and Zilhoao had chosen to view their commentary as a personal attack, as they “were at pains” to be as “diplomatic as well as honest” as possible in their commentary and “intended no direspect” to Trinkhaus, Zilhoao or any of their colleagues “either personally or as scientists”.
Whilst albeit today, in the context of this decade’s advancements as cited in the paragraphs above, this review’s author feels obligated by way of rational reason to largely concur with some, but not all, of what Trinkaus and Zihoao had to say in regards to Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s commentary in the June 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [19]; their online attack’s deviation from the appropriate procedures of intellectual and academic scientific discourse lead this writer to take the side of Tattersal and Schwartz. In spite of the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the commentary in question that are, with the benefit of more than a decade of scientific progress in the field; as detailed above; made readily apparent, it is Trinkaus’s history of claiming multiple discoveries as evidence to support his hypothesis, and his attribution of just such distortion of empirical evidence onto others, that diminishes significantly the objective scientific credibility of what could otherwise be widely considered to be breakthrough discoveries in his field.
And while the exceptionally vitriolic internet rhetoric from Trinkaus and Zilhoao could quite easily be claimed not to whatsoever represent the attitudes of the other authors of the paper on the Lagar Velho child; the fact remains that the scientific community has, thus far without any recognizably substantial challenge, permitted these two dogmatist ideologues to represent what this review writer strongly believes positively must be a much more extensive and diverse group. This reflects poorly not only on the fringe zealots themselves, for their own words and actions, but on their colleagues, who remain objectively, if not unquestionably, blameless.
Throughout the course of writing this review, what is by far the greatest obstacle encountered has been the fact that, in the commentary in 1999, Tattersall and Schwartz were debunking a scientific proposition, namely that there were Neanderthal biological contributions to modern humans, which when considered in the light of the most contemporary research as mentioned above, appears all but irrefutable.
Yet another challenge has been the dearth of extant corroborating resources topical to the 1999 discovery at Lagar Velho in Portugal [3] [17] [21], as was evidenced by the reality of the most extensive wellspring of information on the topic being the aforementioned correspondences amongst and between the scientists themselves. [19] This, when it was contrasted alongside what are nearly astronomical varieties of scientific, academic, and journalistic documentations regarding the more recent advances [1] [2] [5] [8] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [18] [20] [22], made all the more difficult the effort on the part of this author to present the reader(s) of this review with a sufficiently well-balanced, between 20th and 21st century science, and well rounded paper, to as great an extent as was within the writer’s capability to produce.
Given the most current science, there is little choice but to conclude that Trinkaus’s, Duarte’s, and their Portuguese archaeological team’s discoveries, if not the conclusions they drew from their findings, were closer to what is now known to be the truth than were Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s critiques of those findings. However, even without the nearly-apoplectic tirade impugning Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s persons by Trinkaus and his colleague, even the style of the presentation of the evidence in the commentary was superior to that in the Portuguese group’s article, in spite of the volume of evidence being greater in the article than in the commentary.
The writer of this review must also take into consideration the fact that resources were found in which credible and reputable experts in their respective fields openly and eloquently disputed the results, findings, and conclusions of Dr. Trinkaus’s credited “contributions” to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in both the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This while, with the dismissible exception of Trinkaus’s own profoundly personal vitriol and hostility toward the authors, no scientific experts could be located who either debunked or refuted the critiques of Trinkhaus’s and colleagues’ findings. [21]
Even when, more than a decade after he and his colleague wrote their critique of the hybridization hypothesis, new evidence came to light that resoundingly proved a contribution to modern humans by Neanderthals at the most foundational biological level, in our genes, it is especially notable by this author as being nothing short of extraordinary the graciousness, degree of humility, and downright enthusiasm with which Doctor Tattersall himself personally welcomed the genuinely revolutionary scientific discoveries of this new century. [20]
The writer of this review would, in all honesty, have been almost completely at a loss had it not been for the advantage of fortunately being in the possession of a dozen years to a decade and a half of useful background knowledge on this subject. In researching this article review, the author found the evidence discovered in the most recent scientific experiments to be far more fascinating than those uncovered so many years before, which were found to be, as they have been described, correctly, even presciently, by the scientists themselves as being “outdated”, on occasion only just shortly following their publication. However, this writer also went to great lengths to recognize the relevance and even significance of the previous discoveries in the context of setting the proper precedent upon which the proceeding experiments that followed were to be founded.
The evidence presented in an article by Cidalia Duarte and Joao Zilhao; of the Portuguese Institute for the Management of Architectural and Archaeological Heritage; Joao Mauricio and Pedro Souto; of the Torrejana Speleological and Archaeological Society; Dr. Paul Pettitt, PhD; of the University of Sheffield; Erik Trinkaus, PhD; Professor of Physical Anthropology at Washington University; and Dr. Hans Van Der Plicht; of the University of Groningen; in “The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia” in the same Proceedings of the NAS [3] for the child in question being the end result of centuries, if not millennia of hybridization between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals fundamentally amounted to the appearance that it did not accurately match the features of modern humans.
As such, disproving the specimen as a hybrid was a simple matter of demonstrating that, as a child, the four-year old would not have been a fully matured adult specimen of the species, and as such would not have yet fully developed those features as are characteristic of our species as we now know it today.
As is shown in the publicization of the Portuguese discovery in an April 25, 1999 article by New York Times senior science correspondent John Noble Wilford; numerous experts in the field at the time concurred with the Portuguese Archaeologists’ interpretations of their find. Two of the most ardent proponents of their interpretation cited in the Times article were Dr. Fred Smith, PhD, Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Illinois State University, and Dr. Milford Wolpoff, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Smith said that the Portuguese Archaeologists’ interpretations were “absolutely right” and Dr. Wolpoff said that the Portuguese discovery was “devastating” to the opposition theory of the time. In Wilford’s article, Dr. Alan Templeton, Professor of Biology at Washington University does some to explain away Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s critiques of the Portuguese specimen. Templeton explains that hybridization can occur without the effect becoming visible.
Two of the experts that Noble Wilford’s Times article cites; Dr. Chris Stringer, PhD, of the London Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Alan Mann, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania; remain unconvinced by the findings of the Portuguese Archaeologists. Even Dr. Wolpoff states that more evidence would be required in order to discern definitive evidence of hybridization. [21]
More than a decade after these articles were published, however, new evidence came to light that would make it indefinitely more difficult for Tattersall and Schwartz, or anyone else for that matter, to disprove the results of human-Neanderthal hybridization.
In a 2011 Newcomb Cleveland Prize-winning research article entitled “Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome” and a companion report, both in the Friday, May 7, 2010 Volume 328, Issue 5979 of the Journal Science, a research team; led by Dr. Svante Paabo, PhD, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Richard Green, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and David Reich, Associate Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School; found that Neanderthal and human DNA is 99.7% identical (as opposed to being 98.8% identical with Chimpanzees), inherited from a common ancestor 706,000 years ago; but also, much more significantly, that at least 4 percent of the Eurasian genome of non-Africans as far afield as Papua New Guinea is derived from Neanderthals. [5]
As reported in an article by Nicholas Wade for the New York Times, the team recovered and reconstructed 60 percent, 3.7 billion base pairs, of the Neanderthal genome [20]; which, in spite of more than a third of the 5.3 billion-letter genome remaining un-sequenced, Dr. Green is quoted by Ewen Callaway in the New Scientist as calling “pretty darn good”. [2]
The four-year Neanderthal Genome Project, the sequencing of the Neanderthal mitochondrial genome extracted from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal fossils found in 1974 in Vindija Cave near Varazdin, Croatia founded on July 20, 2006, according to a piece by Geir Moulson for the Associated Press, and completed August 7, 2008 and announced by the Max Planck Institute at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 12, 2009, involved many universities worldwide and concluded a thirteen-year pursuit by Dr. Paabo and the Max Planck Institute. [9]
Modern humans originated in Africa 200,000 years ago, and a small population of humans left Africa 50,000 years ago. From their findings, the team surmised that the interbreeding occurred in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East 45-100,000 years ago. In Europe and West Asia, Neanderthals coexisted with humans in small groups 30-50,000 years ago. Neanderthals existed from about 400,000 years ago and, as a species, the last Neanderthals fell extinct about 24,000 years ago. According to Doctor Reich in a piece by Joe Palca for NPR, modern humans and Neanderthals “overlapped between about 30,000 and 80,000 years ago”. [11]
In an article by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times [20] and a piece for MSNBC, Dr. Tattersall himself praised the Planck Institute’s research as “a fabulous achievement”. An article by Kate Wong in the May 6, 2010 Scientific American has even Dr. Wolpoff calling the research team’s findings “important evidence”. [22] In similar articles by Jennifer Pinkowski for Time Magazine [12] and by Ker Than for National Geographic [18], Dr. Trinkaus speculated that while four percent was the minimum, most modern humans probably have much more Neanderthal DNA, and that the genetic flow between Neanderthals and early humans might have been as high as “ten to twenty percent”. Than’s National Geographic piece quotes Dr. Green, in what it refers to as a “prepared statement” confirming that there was, “in all probability”, gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans. [18] Dr. Reich states in an article by Randolph Schmid from the Associated Press that there was “no indication” of the flow of genes from humans to Neanderthals. [15] An article by Robert Lee Hotz in the Wall Street Journal includes Dr. Smith questioning whether or not, with up to 5% genetic overlap, the humans and Neanderthals should continue to be considered as separate species. [8] Both a piece by Paul Rincon for BBC News [13] and its companion article by Ian Sample, PhD, for the Guardian [14], as well as Wong’s Scientific American article and Hotz’s Wall Street Journal piece [8] have Dr. Stringer as stating that the research team’s findings are a confirmation of the theory of which he was the architects, but, unlike Dr. Trinkaus, calling the discoveries “surprising”, and looking forward to what he refers as being the “next big step”, finding the functional significance of the Neanderthal genes, which the study did not address, with Dr. Green telling Callaway of the New Scientist that there was “no compelling story…that jumps out…where you say…this difference…let us write poetry instead of ,making stone tools.” [2] In Sample’s Guardian article, Dr. Green concedes that the team was unable to “speculate in any meaningful way” how Neanderthals and modern humans might have interacted on a cultural level. [14]
Dr. Green had coordinated the Neanderthal Genome Project since 2005, according to Hotz’s Wall Street Journal article [8], and had previously published an article, along with Dr. Paabo, entitled “Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA” in the November 16, 2006 Volume 444 of the Journal Nature [6]; as well as another article, also with Dr. Paabo, in the August 8, 2008 Volume 134 Issue 2 of the Journal Cell. [4]
Dr. Trinkaus is credited as having “contributed” the Portuguese Archaeologists’ paper to the National Academy on April 26, 1999. [3] Dr. Trinkaus is referred to as the most vocal proponent of the hybridization hypothesis who, according to Schmid of the Associated Press, has “long argued that Neanderthals contributed to the human genome”. [15] Trinkaus is known for also being credited with “contributing” another paper, which he also co-authored, to the National Academy on September 26, 2006; which was published in the November 14, 2006 Volume 103 Issue 46 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [16].
As publicized in a November 2, 2006 piece by Jacqui Hayes for Cosmos Magazine, Trinkaus claims the 30,000-year old cranium, shoulder blade, and leg bone of an adult human female first found in 1952 in the Cave of Pestera Muierii (“Cave of the Old Woman”) in Romania as a hybrid, reporting what he calls a “mosaic of human and Neanderthal features” in the bones. [7] Trinkaus told E.J Mundell of Healthday on October 30, 2006 that the bones were “basically modern human fossils” with characteristics that are “more similar” to what are “found in frequently in Neanderthals”, and which Trinkaus claimed were “very easy to derive from Neanderthals through some kind of interbreeding”, but were “very difficult…if not impossible” to derive from early modern humans”. [10]
Trinkaus used the same terminology to describe the Portugese find in Noble Wilford’s 1999 New York Times article, calling it a “complex mosaic” and saying that the 24,500-year-old 4-year-old is “no love child”, but the descendant of generations of hybrids. [21]
However, as with the Portugese find, according to Mundell, other experts remained unconvinced. Named in the October 30th Healthday piece is Jeffrey Laitman, PhD; Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. [10]
However, it was, of all things, Dr. Trinkaus’s response to Dr. Tattersall’s and Dr. Schwartz’s commentary on the Portuguese findings in the June 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, more than anything else, has colored this author’s opinion of the quality of Dr. Trinkaus’s character, as well as those of his colleagues. Dr. Trinkaus and Joao Zilhoao posted on the Internet on June 24, 1999 [19] what Dr. Tattersall called, in a reply dated July 10, 1999, an “intemperate, inappropriate, and inaccurate (not to mention defamatory)…ad hominem…screed” which represented a “grave abuse” of the “privilege of unfettered communication conferred by the internet.” Trinkaus’s and Zilhoao’s article portrayed Tattersall and Schwartz as “self-deluding and intellectually dishonest incompetents” with a “mission to denigrate” Neanderthals; describing their commentary an “inappropriate, inaccurate, and unethical” critique of the Portuguese archaeologists’ article, that was “replete with misinformation, misuse of cladistic and anatomical terminology, misquotes, misrepresentations, poor logic, general incompetence regarding the Late Pleistocene hominid fossil record, anatomical ignorance, and a priori non-evolutionary (typological) approaches.” Trinkaus and Zilhoao stated that Tattersall and Schwartz were “simply ignorant of the relevant aspects of the field” and “intellectually dishonest”, and that they were so “committed to their a priori point of view” that they “subconsciously distort the empirical record” to fit their views, and conclude their remarks by stating that the “gist” of Tattersall and Schwartz’s commentary was that they “don’t know what they are talking about.” In his reply, Tattersal stated that they were “hurt”, “disappointed” and “saddened” that Trinkaus and Zilhoao had chosen to view their commentary as a personal attack, as they “were at pains” to be as “diplomatic as well as honest” as possible in their commentary and “intended no direspect” to Trinkhaus, Zilhoao or any of their colleagues “either personally or as scientists”.
Whilst albeit today, in the context of this decade’s advancements as cited in the paragraphs above, this review’s author feels obligated by way of rational reason to largely concur with some, but not all, of what Trinkaus and Zihoao had to say in regards to Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s commentary in the June 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [19]; their online attack’s deviation from the appropriate procedures of intellectual and academic scientific discourse lead this writer to take the side of Tattersal and Schwartz. In spite of the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the commentary in question that are, with the benefit of more than a decade of scientific progress in the field; as detailed above; made readily apparent, it is Trinkaus’s history of claiming multiple discoveries as evidence to support his hypothesis, and his attribution of just such distortion of empirical evidence onto others, that diminishes significantly the objective scientific credibility of what could otherwise be widely considered to be breakthrough discoveries in his field.
And while the exceptionally vitriolic internet rhetoric from Trinkaus and Zilhoao could quite easily be claimed not to whatsoever represent the attitudes of the other authors of the paper on the Lagar Velho child; the fact remains that the scientific community has, thus far without any recognizably substantial challenge, permitted these two dogmatist ideologues to represent what this review writer strongly believes positively must be a much more extensive and diverse group. This reflects poorly not only on the fringe zealots themselves, for their own words and actions, but on their colleagues, who remain objectively, if not unquestionably, blameless.
Throughout the course of writing this review, what is by far the greatest obstacle encountered has been the fact that, in the commentary in 1999, Tattersall and Schwartz were debunking a scientific proposition, namely that there were Neanderthal biological contributions to modern humans, which when considered in the light of the most contemporary research as mentioned above, appears all but irrefutable.
Yet another challenge has been the dearth of extant corroborating resources topical to the 1999 discovery at Lagar Velho in Portugal [3] [17] [21], as was evidenced by the reality of the most extensive wellspring of information on the topic being the aforementioned correspondences amongst and between the scientists themselves. [19] This, when it was contrasted alongside what are nearly astronomical varieties of scientific, academic, and journalistic documentations regarding the more recent advances [1] [2] [5] [8] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [18] [20] [22], made all the more difficult the effort on the part of this author to present the reader(s) of this review with a sufficiently well-balanced, between 20th and 21st century science, and well rounded paper, to as great an extent as was within the writer’s capability to produce.
Given the most current science, there is little choice but to conclude that Trinkaus’s, Duarte’s, and their Portuguese archaeological team’s discoveries, if not the conclusions they drew from their findings, were closer to what is now known to be the truth than were Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s critiques of those findings. However, even without the nearly-apoplectic tirade impugning Tattersall’s and Schwartz’s persons by Trinkaus and his colleague, even the style of the presentation of the evidence in the commentary was superior to that in the Portuguese group’s article, in spite of the volume of evidence being greater in the article than in the commentary.
The writer of this review must also take into consideration the fact that resources were found in which credible and reputable experts in their respective fields openly and eloquently disputed the results, findings, and conclusions of Dr. Trinkaus’s credited “contributions” to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in both the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This while, with the dismissible exception of Trinkaus’s own profoundly personal vitriol and hostility toward the authors, no scientific experts could be located who either debunked or refuted the critiques of Trinkhaus’s and colleagues’ findings. [21]
Even when, more than a decade after he and his colleague wrote their critique of the hybridization hypothesis, new evidence came to light that resoundingly proved a contribution to modern humans by Neanderthals at the most foundational biological level, in our genes, it is especially notable by this author as being nothing short of extraordinary the graciousness, degree of humility, and downright enthusiasm with which Doctor Tattersall himself personally welcomed the genuinely revolutionary scientific discoveries of this new century. [20]
The writer of this review would, in all honesty, have been almost completely at a loss had it not been for the advantage of fortunately being in the possession of a dozen years to a decade and a half of useful background knowledge on this subject. In researching this article review, the author found the evidence discovered in the most recent scientific experiments to be far more fascinating than those uncovered so many years before, which were found to be, as they have been described, correctly, even presciently, by the scientists themselves as being “outdated”, on occasion only just shortly following their publication. However, this writer also went to great lengths to recognize the relevance and even significance of the previous discoveries in the context of setting the proper precedent upon which the proceeding experiments that followed were to be founded.
- Burbano H.A., Hodges E., Green R.E., Briggs A.W., Krause J., Meyer M., Good J.M., Maricic T., Johnson P.L., Xuan Z., et al. “Targeted investigation of the Neandertal genome by array-based sequence capture.” Science. 328 (2010): 723–725. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/723.full.pdf
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