Observations placeholder
Seven Ages of Man - 06 Dwarfs/The Neanderthals - various sources
Identifier
021789
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
According to archaeologists, Neanderthal man was supposed to have disappeared - according to various sources – between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago and chronologically the historians speak of the iron age following a long time after. But the evidence seems to point to something more fluid and far less certain.
Again, according to archaeologists, Neanderthals may have lived in co-existence with homo sapiens for about 10,000 years. Myth and legend calls them duergar[that has been erroneously interpreted as meaning dwarf] and occasionally mountain trolls and puts the actual disappearance of dwarfs and Neanderthal man as much later. Living in forests and mountains hidden from view and only appearing irregularly to exchange goods and services, dwarfs/Neanderthals were slowly driven North and possibly to a form of extinction but lived far later in isolated pockets than archaeologists would have us believe.
Archaeological evidence is based on fossil records, but there is a real problem with relying on fossil records to deduce where and when species or sub species disappeared. Bearing in mind fossils can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 9.3 million square kilometres, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, most fossils will never be known. Since Neanderthals did not produce complex burial sites, it is even more unlikely we will ever find fossil records of any late survivors.
The observation thus covers three viewpoints – the archaeological, the genetic and the myth and legend, for comparison
There is ore about the Neandertals in the other observations - see alsoThomas Keightley for more myth and fable
A description of the experience
Archaeological
Source: The Neanderthal's Necklace – Juan Luis Arsuaga
The appearance of Neanderthal cranial features, subtle at first but increasing with time and categorical by the end of the Middle Pleiocene, is evidence for the European origin of the Neanderthals, a key question in evaluating the two models of human evolution …. I don't think that any African or Asian Middle Pleocene fossil has these cranial features, even in incipient form, so I deduce that there was no exchange of genes between the Neanderthals' ancestors and other human populations of their time. They evolved in Europe in complete or nearly complete genetic isolation
Genetic
Svante Pääbo: DNA clues to our inner neanderthal TEDGlobal 2011 · 17:01 · Filmed Jul 2011
What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans. …….my research group -- since over 25 years now -- works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old. So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA, how you convert it to a form you can sequence. You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself. And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far. And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today.
……. one question that you may then want to ask is, what happened when we met? Did we mix or not? And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today. So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals, starting with two Africans, looking at the two African genomes, finding places where they differ from each other, and in each case ask: What is a Neanderthal like? Does it match one African or the other African? We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa. They should be equal, have no reason to be closer to one African than another African. And that's indeed the case.
Statistically speaking, there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other. But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African. Then, significantly more often, does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African. The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often. This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China.
……. So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
Myth and fable
One of the oldest surviving mythical records within Europe is the Edda.
The Edda
“The Duergar had first been created and had taken life in Ymir's flesh and were maggots in it, and by the will of the gods they became partakers of human knowledge and had the likeness of men.... Modsogner was the first of them and then Dyrin”
One should not take this quote literally as though the dwarfs came from the planet earth and from its core. Roughly translated it means that the Dwarfs [Duergar] became physically existent beings as opposed to spiritual beings [Ymir being the personification of the earth and physical form] . To use an analogy and borrow from Plato, the spiritual world was the software world of function, whilst the physical world is the hardware world of form.
Grimm's Deutsche Sagen
“On the north side of the Hartz there dwelt several thousand dwarfs in the clefts of the rocks and in the Dwarf caves that remain. It was but rarely that they appeared to the inhabitants
Thomas Keightley and his scholarly compendium of myths and fables entitled The World Guide to Gnomes, Fairies, Elves and Other Little People
It is supposed that the early inhabitants of the Swiss mountains, when driven back by later tribes of immigrants, retired to the high lands and took refuge in the clefts and caverns of the mountains, whence they gradually showed themselves to the new settlers – approached them – assisted them and were finally, as a species of Genii, raised to the region of the wonderful