I think roast Neanderthal would be rather stringy and tough, requiring lots of marinade. Other than that, cloning one would be wonderful. It would answer so many questions that we can’t right now, including a big one. Were those small rocks with the odd scratches on them art, or writing?
Given all that we can learn about the evolution of humanity from such a project, the ethical questions should not even be a consideration.

I would just like to note that chimps are not monkeys. They are apes, and anything made from their manipulated DNA would also be an ape.
Also, the first picture shows a reconstruction based on a skeleton of a 12 year old boy, who may be the product of Neanderthal and modern human interbreeding.

“If they’re animals, not humans, couldn’t we use them as servants or slaves — or pets?”
Or pundits, if your resident Calvinist political blabber ever decided to leave you.

At Charles: Sure- it would help a lot to study them – but even if they ARE an animal, animals still feel emotion. What would you do with it after you’re done studying? You can’t release it into the cities, if it’s one of a kind it couldn’t survive out in the wild, and it would die of depression if you kept it in a cage. What do you do? I think that if you can answer where it goes afterward, you can clone it. And people seem to keep forgetting that these are our FORERUNNERS. They have feelings, too.

Wow, what an almost dizzying array of questions! I think that there’s enough evidence that Neanderthals were similar enough to humans to quash the notion of cloning them as one would an animal.
To treat them as anything less would be less than human on our part.

Only the kind of moron that believes the earth and everything on it was created,all together or days apart, would believe that “scientists” could make a Neanderthal from “chimp DNA”. there seems to be nothing so ridiculous for such people to believe. In the world of the such people science is the new sorcery, and its “practioners” necromancers who can summon torglodytic devil men to offed god. I fear for the future, that all such delusional types are wandering around unsupervised.

“Only the kind of moron that believes the earth and everything on it was created,all together or days apart, would believe that “scientists” could make a Neanderthal from “chimp DNA”. there seems to be nothing so ridiculous for such people to believe. In the world of the such people science is the new sorcery, and its “practioners” necromancers who can summon torglodytic devil men to offed god. I fear for the future, that all such delusional types are wandering around unsupervised”
you’re athiest aren’t you?

I think that neanderthals were created from humans. Like they were humans mixed with something else. And by that i don’t mean apes or anything….but definitely a creature with superior and almost supernatural build. Therefore creating neanderthals, like hybrids. This might support the theory about other life forms in this universe.

Stephanie,
You don’t have to think (thank God) – science has already worked out the evolutionary relationships..
As to the questions – it’s worth pointing out (in case you missed it) that we do have some other close relatives on this planet – they are called great apes. I haven’t seen any of them sitting on juries, although we did have one running the country until very recently.

hey is the pic real??

In europe the basque people in the mountians between France and Spain still carry the neanderthal genes heavily. Also some scandinavian families on the west coast. There the neandrathal is heavy
They weren’t “wiped out” by the cro magnons, they are being assimilated, and this is cool.
Much better to live and let live than to exterminate people who are different than you.
I’m ’round 30 % primitive, please excuse me

Actually, a little bit of crossbreeding between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal is likely where Caucasians came up with the genes for blue/green eyes and red/blond hair. Cro-Magnon shows to be dark haired prior to the two coming into contact with each other, and while the mixing may have been extremely limited, I have no doubt it happened… whether by choice or force. Also, Neanderthal possessed the genes for multiple births. Caucasians show this about 20% of the time. Asians much more rarely, and Africans almost never. There are other genetic traits we share with him, but those are the most obvious.
We know they were tool makers, big game hunters, buried their dead, and had family units. They may not have possessed an IQ equal to Asians or Caucasians of today (probably closer to that of Sub Saharan Africans), but they would still be far more human than animals. To clone one beyond the test tube stage would be ethically horrific, as it would live it’s entire life the subject of scientific experimentation.

“They may not have possessed an IQ equal to Asians or Caucasians of today (probably closer to that of Sub Saharan Africans), but they would still be far more human than animals.”
Wow Whitedear, you manage to suggest that Sub Saharan Africans are at least 30 thousand years behind “modern man” in their IQ development. I’m wondering if you think they are more human than animals too. Perhaps that’s why big pharma has so freely done large scale drug testing there. Attitudes like this.

Humans are apes…biologically speaking. We are in the ape family. @
scott, there is not sufficient evidence for that.

@Whitedeer PEOPLE IN AFRICA DO NOT HAVE LOWER IQS THAN OTHER PEOPLE. Race is cultural, it doesn’t biologically determine IQ. Go back to school please!!!!!!!

Elizabeth, seriously, you should do a little research into IQ along racial lines. Subsaharan Africans routinely test around 65 on standardized IQ tests. Asians tend to test the highest, with Caucasians slightly below them. North American blacks test on average around 80. Originally, the IQ scoring set 85 as the cutoff for “normal intelligence” but that number was lowered to 70 because over 50% of American blacks were scoring as mentally retarded. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Read the study by Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray.
I’m sorry that you believe race is cultural. Clearly you do not understand what is involved in genetic selection, nor the thousands of years it takes to make one single significant change in phenotype. Do you think that the epincanthic folds of an Asian’s eyes are cultural? How about the wooly hair of the African, designed to protect his brain from the scorching African sun? Is the light skin of the Caucasian, developed over generations to enable him to absorb as much Vit D as possible from his cloudy climate of origins, simply a “cultural” thing?
Clearly not. Cultural implies things such as a preference for a certain kind of music, a way of dress, or a speech pattern. Race, OTOH, is the result of thousands and thousands of years of natural selection.
Africans did not have to continue evolving because they remained in their place of origin. Asians and Caucasians, however, had to continually adapt as they migrated out of northern Africa into Asian and Europe, survived not one but two ice ages, over a period of 30,000 years. So yes, Mussen, to answer you as well, Asians and Caucasians were forced by nature to continue evolving for about 30,000 years after they left their African counterparts behind in Africa.
Now, you two take your lame attempts at insulting me and go read a book or ten, because it really sounds like you could use the education.

Whitedeer, from what you’ve said, it appears that your touted research amounts to little more than having read Herrnstein and Murray’s “The Bell Curve”, which was not a study but a popular science book that published in such a format precisely to avoid the scientific peer review process.
I notice how you tried to stack as many titles behind Herrstein and Murray as possible. Perhaps you thought it would hide the fact that neither were qualified on the topic – Murray, a former white supremacist cross-burner*-cum-political writer who wrote books railing against Black Americans and the welfare state. Herrnstein, though a psychologist, had no relevant background in psychometrics.
The 1-4% of our genome that has been recently discovered to have derived from Neanderthals is widely dispersed and is not limited to Europeans. Naturally blond hair is also found among people such as Australian Aborigines and native Peruvians, and can’t be explained by mixing between Neanderthals based . Modern day “Europeans” and “sub-Saharan Africans” are not the same peoples that have lived there since the Ice Ages, due to the Indo-European and Bantu expansions, respectively, so the static evolution over 30,000 years model that you’re proposing – already a perilously short time frame – did not happen. There are further mistakes in what you said, but it should be clear to everyone else by now that you have no clue what you’re talking about save for tidbits and half-truths dregged up in the Arthur Jensen/Steve Sailer echo chambers. So I won’t bother.
*To be fair to Murray, he has since repeatedly denounced those past affiliations, and his arguments attacking the welfare state and the state of Black American are about as rational and levelheaded as you’re going to get from the libertarian Right. I include this because it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t a case of a controlled study published by a reputed scientist, as you tried to imply, but a popular science book compiling cherry-picked data from an amateur author with a clear, if no longer hateful, political bias.
Elizabeth, given the conditions in Africa, it

We allow people to have children with disabilities such as autism or down syndrome, yet this is not ‘unethical’.

A Neanderthal child will provide us with insight into our evolution, contributing more to science than 99% of the human population. There is no reason why a Neanderthal can’t be happy, with the appropriate support, in our society.