Humans and Neanderthal Offspring - Many Questions
Many of you have likely read of DNA analysis revealing modern humans with a significant percentage of Neanderthal DNA. This brings up some really intriguing theological questions related to the creation of man, questions concerning whether man evolved from the animal kingdom, and whether the offspring of those human / neanderthal couplings were fully human with a God-given soul. Hugh Ross' Reasons to Believe (RTB) organization has weighed in on the issue in the two linked articles below.
Some may remember that (in 2005) RTB developed it's creation model for human origins based upon Scripture and its Old Earth / Old Universe scientific views that reject Darwinian / Neo-Darwinian evolutionary models connecting mankind's origins to the animal kingdom. And initially, RTB rejected (but later acknowledged) the idea that humans and Neanderthals had produced offspring - until key DNA studies made it clear and based on good data. Early research studies demonstrated that, collectively, Neanderthal sequences are distributed throughout 20 percent of the human genome. And 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome can be reconstructed from Neanderthal sequences found in a sampling of Eurasian genomes. Later, an international team of scientists working with the deCODE project, determined the genome sequences for nearly half the Icelandic population. The team made use of this data set, analyzing over 27,500 Icelander genomes for Neanderthal contribution using a newly developed algorithm. They detected over 14.4 million fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their data set. Of these, 112,709 were unique sequences that collectively constituted 48 percent of the Neanderthal genome. Individual Icelanders have about a 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal contribution to their genomes, with the precise contribution differing from person to person.
As a side note: Many YOUNG-earth creationists assert the Neanderthals were fully human.
Here is RTB's 3-minute introduction to the issues of the extinct "human-like" primates, called hominids, including the Neanderthals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqp37_N_k9g
In two short articles, RTB's Fazale Rana gives some really interesting input into the issues, including theological ones about Creation of man, the soul of any such offspring - and how God may "install it," massive differences between the two species (human and Neanderthal), and even speculates how the Nephilim from Genesis 6 might play into these findings.
https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/the-c ... ing-part-1
https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/the-c ... ing-part-2