Raindrop Drinkwater

Yes, I've been wondering about that overnight.

What would be the point in recreating Neanderthals? What would we learn from them, exactly? Is it really worth recreating an ancient lifeform just to check what colour were their eyes?

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Charlemagne Allen

I had an idea for a book once. It would involved a theme park where people cloned dinosaurs, and there was a power outage and things got out of control. I thought it might be fun if I threw some really cool small lizards such as raptors in the park. Wouldn't that be a great idea?

Seriously, any ancient being we cloned would not be proof of an example of ancient specimen, since genes express in very quirky ways They've found with certain GM potatoes that if you insert the same genes into several potates, it will not express in the exact same way, and potatoes are slightly less complex than ancient primates.

A person trying to clone a Neanderthal would probably start by grinding a ton of fossilized femur bones in the hope that they contain a full strand of DNA hasn't been messed up in a few million years. That would be a tall order in itself. After that, they would likely end up taking an egg from a woman (highly unethical--- the Korean guy who made the false claims of human cloning was chastised for taking egg samples from his lab assistant), and then implanting the complete strand of DNA in the egg. Then you would have the fertilized egg of a test tube baby Neanderthal. I'm not quite sure what you do after that point: implant it in a human female? use an artifical womb? It wouldn't be easy thing to do at all.....

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Lewis Luminos

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Beebo Brink

We have a tedency to think modern culture is difficult and complex because of the technologies we use, but its actually much less taxing in many ways. We can survive with a lot less individual effort, which probably makes us rather lazy intellectually.

I'm in the middle of reading about the collapse of civilizations and one of the cultures that is described in detail is the agricultural society of New Guinea. The farming techniques are so complex that it takes decades to learn, starting in childhood. Members of the tribe who go away to school, return to find they don't even have the skills to keep up the family garden. They missed too much information in their absence.

Other pre-literate tribes have intricate systems of social connections and linguistic terms to describe the matrix of how everyone is related to one another. Not to mention an intimate knowledge of their surroundings -- from plants to animals -- that enables them to survive in a hostile eco niche.

Humans today aren't any different in character and intelligence than we were 60,000 years ago or more. Our most recent evolutionary changes have been in defense against disease rather than in morphological changes. What has changed is our culture, but that is ephemeral and all too easily lost.

Given the fragility of our high-tech infrastructure, and how little the average individual knows about basic survival skills, I think those of us in industrial nations are living on borrowed time. We're like a bunch of kids who never had to grow up,

</derail>

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Redhead

Many people asked what was the point of building the LHC.

Pure science has value in and of itself. We have no idea what we may or may not learn.

The point would be doing it, learning from it.

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jauani

a> it would be fun for nerd.. it's like the particle accelerator...

b> they provide a more human like animal to run studies on in comparision to apes, pigs, rabbits, and other rodents.

c> we can use them for harvesting organs

d> if we can domesticate them, we could "employ" them for menial labour and then realize the situationist manifesto.

Colette Meiji

I think you have Neanderthals confused with some of the earlier human species.

Neanderthal man had on average a similar brain size ratio as we do.

They used tools and fire. They probably invented religion.

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Of course "resurrecting" isn't really necessary .. since although our ancestors largely wiped them out, there almost certainly was some interbreeding.

Their DNA was passed on.

We are the same species as they were. Its the subspecies thats different.

Colette Meiji

It would be a freak if people knew that person was a Neanderthal.

If the clone just was created it could probably pass as a modern human.

Our current species biologic diversity is probably wide enough you wouldn't look twice as the Neanderthal.

Colette Meiji

Considering that part of IQ is environment as well as other factors .. its quite possible that cloned Neanderthal could have an IQ of 145 rather than 90.

I think the concern about its lack of evolution are really baseless. The differences genetically are too small. Maybe if someone were to argue resurrecting Homo Erectus it would be different.

It would be more like the idea of trying to clone a historical figure, Like say an Egyptian from DNA found on a mummy.