[betwixthewires]

Thanks for this, I didn't see the comment in the article.

The minute I saw "horizontal slit eyes" I was pretty much done. There's literally no way to know if that was true, for that to be a claim in a proposed theory rightly discredits that theory. I can see them being hairy. But deducing from having larger eyes that they'd be nocturnal and therefore have horizontal slit eyes...

And then there's the issue of the flat face. I'm no anthropologist but I understand the structure of the face and I have seen a few pictures of Neanderthal skulls, they absolutely had a protruding hooded nose just like us, no doubt about it.

Looking at a skeleton, they obviously are very similar to us in form. All this stuff about them being vastly different looking monstrous human relatives is just fantasy.

[projektfu]

The suggestion that Neanderthal had a tapetum lucidum is also weird as that is a feature that has been lost in almost all extant primates, including nocturnal ones, except the bush baby.

[mattkrause]

I believe some tarsiers have it too, but yeah...this whole part seems like evolutionary fan-fiction.

[projektfu]

I was wrong, some lemurs also have tapeta but, oddly, tarsiers don’t, in spite of having many more adaptations to low light.

What’s weird is that the advocate of the orc theory just throws in details without even considering whether they’re plausible. A full hair coat? Easy, we already have hair, and most of our “relatives” have full coats. Larger teeth? Sure. A gain of function that’s been lost to an entire phylum, including the apes he references? Unlikely.

[projektfu]

I meant clade not phylum. Sleepy?

[PeterisP]

"There's literally no way to know if that was true" - we don't know now, but hypothetically in the future, wouldn't it be plausible to determine such traits from their DNA? We have a full DNA sequence, and wherever (and whenever, in the future) we know what impact particular genes had on some traits in primates, we can check how the neanderthals had it.

Heck, it would not get attempted due to ethical issues, but technically it might be even plausible to clone a neanderthal using a human surrogate mother, there has been some work in cross-species cloning.

[throwaway316943]

The facial description did sound like quite a stretch. If anything, a more human face would be even more terrifying. These creatures are often described as very close to human but with savagely exaggerated features. An ape with a snout is more understandable than a monstrous face with large, staring eyes, huge mouth and deformed nose. Look at any traditional depiction of human like monsters and those are the features you’ll see.