No, hominin fossils are not all the same.

Given that anti-evolutionists in our community are invariably extremely poorly informed on even the basics of palaeoanthropology, I am not surprised to see sweeping statements such as "there is no evidence that Neanderthal man existed", uncritical repetition of creationist aphorisms such as "all life breeds after its own kind" or even "there are no different species of humans, only different races." Anyone who makes these assertions is positively shouting the fact that they know nothing of the subject at all. The morphological differences between humans and Neanderthals are clear and unmistakable. Furthermore, we now have the Neanderthal genome, which is clearly distinct from that of the human. Both anatomy and genetics confirm that Neanderthals existed, and were clearly different from us. In this post, I will summarise this information.

A million years of hominins in the Middle East

In my last post, I pointed out that as a medical professional educated in the genomics era, evolution denialism is simply not an option. The evidence against universal human descent from two people a mere six thousand years ago and for human-ape common ancestry just from human genetics is overwhelming.  This is however not something exclusively restricted to believers who are medical or life sciences professionals. Anyone who studies science at high school or takes an interest in natural history will be well aware of the evidence for human antiquity stretching back far beyond six thousand years. While a parental scrawl of "Not True!" in the "Human Evolution" section of the family copy of the Junior World Encyclopaedia may have been enough forty years ago, given the widespread availability of material on human evolution today [1-8], the fundamentalist battle to censor palaeoanthropology has been lost before it even starts.

Fundamentalists assert, based on a highly literal reading of the creation narratives, that the human race began 6000 years ago in south-west Asia. However, what the archaeological and palaeoanthropological data from this area show is that not only does evidence of human settlement in this area extend back well before 4000 BCE without any evidence of discontinuity, human fossils can be found back well over 100,000 years ago, with hominin fossils appearing in Turkey around one million years ago. It is impossible to dogmatically assert that no human was alive more than six thousand years ago, Adam was the first human being to exist or that every human who has ever lived descended exclusively from Adam. Just the fossil evidence from the near East flatly refutes these dogmatic assertions, and pretending they do not exist or threatening to excommunicate people who point out these facts will not make them go away.

Fundamentalism and faith - or why science denialism harms Christianity

The saddest thing have learned in my 33 years as a member of our community is that the greatest obstacle I have faced in following Christ has not come from the world, but from the efforts of fundamentalist extremists both to make a tendentious and highly selective reading of our community's views on Genesis normative for everyone, and to make one of the best attested scientific facts a 'doctrine to be rejected.' I've written many times on how 'nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution'. [1] This isn't hyperbole. Human anatomy, genetics, and embryology positively shout the fact of our evolutionary origin, while evolutionary biology is of increasing utility in areas such as infectious diseases, epidemiology, and cancer biology. Pretending that evolution is not a fact for me is no  more an option than pretending that the Earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the Earth.