but the map I showed didn't completely show semi-arid/desert climates within the Neanderthal range.
I looked, their range remained in the colder climates of the late ice age. That's exactly where they would be expected to be if they were specialized for that colder climate.
Them having been there for 200,000 years or so would have, I think, given them enough time to become very good hunters in their region. If the climate were to have changed, I'm sure that those left in areas that attracted live games would have been able to out-compete Humans, who were just entering the area, no?
Not necessarily. We're very adaptable to different environments, something the neanderthals may have lacked. The neanderthals hadn't faced such competition for resources or the change in the environment to a warmer climate, something we could handle more efficiently. This creates a blow to the species on two fronts, possibly more.
I won't completely ignore the other hypotheses either though, so even if I may be wrong about the change in climate we still have a good number of other possibilities that could have put us at an advantage. Another thing to consider is maybe each hypothesis played at least a small role in their demise.
Further more it's quite possible they were the fitter of the species. "Survival of the fittest" can be misleading. it's a matter of reproduction. Let's use an example with just two people. These people are students at the same school. StudentA is a perfectly sculpted, head of the football team straight A+ student. StudentB has nothing really all that special about him, not very strong, C average student, horrible at sports. In ever imaginable way StudentA is the fittest of the two. But for what ever reason StudentA never get's a girl pregnant, maybe he's a jerk and drives the girls off before getting that far, maybe he had his testicles cut off in a horrible shop class accident, maybe he just doesn't find a girl that strikes his interest. But StudentB does find a girlfriend, gets marriage and has a bunch of kids. StudentB even though not the fittest gets to pass his genes on to the next generation. This scenario can also apply to groups, or in the case of neanderthals and homosapiens, different species.
No, it is. I'm saying that it does not help prove why Humans are such general species. They are by no means controlled by their environment in ways that, a Penguin or Cactus might be.
Yes the guiding principles of evolution apply to us the same as a penguin or a cactus.
Since skin specialization isn't much to us, it is not as if White males have been living in South Africa for centuries now, dying due to exposure towards the sun, is it?
perhaps not now, but lighter skin could have proved an advantage in an environment where it snowed a lot, especially for a species that survives in part by hunting.
I'm not saying that's why the specific mutation took hold, I don't know exactly why.
Also, I don't think that I am adding God into the equation of things I do not know. I don't think God has much to do with the weather at all. I think there will be some things that we do not know that we will find out in the future. Yet with evolution I think differently.
If your not trying to inject god into the unknown aspects aka random variables of evolution then where does he fit?
There is no real reason other then some sort of special pleading that you say god didn't play a role in the weather but he did with evolution. They both depend on explainable natural processes to occur. Just as we can easily remove god as a variable for a thunder storm to form, we do the same with evolution.
Also really trying to combine the two really doesn't work since as a scientific theory we are forced to remove extraneous non functional variables and variables that can't be backed by evidence. God fits both of these. So even if such a being is real, he wasn't needed for the process of evolution.
You said the human fossil record is pretty much complete. If that is the case, then I haven't heard too much about it. The reason is that if Humans did become so dominant a species as to move across the entire Earth, then all of its transitional species died out in the making. Even with this lengthy gradual process that takes so much time, all of these transitional species that you spoke about happened to go away or just become extinct in Africa, and then finally after all of this evolution, Cro-Magnons decided to jump the boat.
Its a little sketchy. I don't think we're ever going to be able to fill that 'we don't know' variable in. [Just for the question of evolution]. This might just be because I'm already biased in wanting to defend religion, Idk, but the idea still stands.
It's not at all sketchy. Many of the transitional forms found belonged to direct lineages of ours. So long as groups didn't diversify we would see the previous forms disappear in favor of other forms. Even with diversified groups, those groups could have simply died out.
This guy took a number of artistic rendering of transitional species and compiled them showing how we may have evolved from an earlier apelike form.
Quest for Truth: Transitional Species And for the first time the Youtube link actually looks a little entertaining so I'll watch it when I get to my laptop
Just so you know it doesn't exactly address your argument, the guy just took the arguments used by creationists and applied them to gravity instead of evolution.
