Were Neanderthals fully human?
Welcome to Creation Basics where our goal is to make 
God’s creation part of your everyday conversation.
In today’s episode we are continuing a series
and featuring number 9 of 10 different instances
where evolutionists have changed position
on a major concept that’s part of the creation/evolution
controversy, towards more of a creationist viewpoint.
I’ve been saying since the beginning of
our series, understand, they haven’t switched
to believe in biblical creation, I’m just
doing this series to highlight to people
that science is revealing creationist interpretations
of facts we see in God’s world, are better
understood according to God’s Word.
Our question today is - Were Neanderthals
fully human?
Obviously, what evolutionists and biblical
creationists believe about where man came
from is completely different.
Evolutionists hold to the idea that man isn’t
really special, other than we’re the more
sophisticated end result of an animal that has 
descended from a long line of ape like creatures.
So the concept that man was created in the
image of God, distinct from the animals and
the rest of God’s creation, is in total
opposition to the materialistic view.
Now over the years, evolutionists have proposed
several supposed primitive ancestors to humans
using certain fossils in support of their claims.
Several versions of this have been produced
and you probably remember seeing pictures
or displays at museums showing a line of skulls
showing what evolutionists believe were part
of our ancient ancestral lineage.
Now as Biblical creationists, we’d say there
are only three ways to make an ape-man:
1) make an ape more human-like,
2) make a human more ape-like, or
3) fraudulently mix the two together.
So we’ve maintained that these fossils are
either the remains of apes or humans, not
some evolutionary intermediary between the two.
And of course, one of the most popular and
well-known, supposed primitive ‘sub-humans’
was supposedly Neanderthal man.
Now to young-earth creationists, Neandertals
are not that mysterious.
We view the Neandertals as the fully human
ancestors of some people today, probably some
Europeans and western Asians, 
where the Neandertals lived.
Hence, we creationists would refer to them as Homo 
sapiens sapiens, or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Either way, we believe that they would be
fully capable of reproducing with modern humans
if they were living today.
They were a post-Flood, Ice Age people group.
But from their earliest evolutionary depictions,
they were shown as only somewhat human and
not very intelligent, kind of primitive looking
and almost deformed, with many evolutionary
scientists believing Neanderthals were quote;
“…lacking the language skills, foresight, creativity, 
and other cognitive abilities of modern humans”.
I remember seeing pictures of them just like
that in my own textbooks, often dragging a
club behind them walking out of a cave.
And this depiction is still popular in museums,
text-books, movies and TV commercials to this day -
I mean some of you probably remember
the Geico commercial a few years ago, with
the slogan - ‘So easy a caveman can do it’?
– and then later the commercials showed
the cavemen were offended because they were
actually smart and thought the commercials
were stereotypical, they were pretty funny!
Well that’s kind of what happened to the Neanderthal 
myth - modern science has revealed the truth.
Do you know it’s been discovered that Neanderthals
made and used makeup,
and stored it in decorative shells!
I mean how many people do you know today that
would have the knowledge, or the time to study
and go looking for and experiment with all of the various 
compounds needed to put makeup together?
The evidence that Neanderthals lacked nothing
that present day humans do is overwhelming,
and the modern depictions of them in evolutionary
magazines like National Geographic appear
fully human.
Even the variances in body structure fall
within the normal range of humans.
You see we now know they had speech ability
and actually had bigger brains than modern
humans, painted exquisite artwork, made musical
instruments, buried their dead in religious
ceremonies, made ‘high-tech superglue’,
used sophisticated tools and weapons, thought
in symbolic terms, used portable light sources 
to navigate in deep caves
and even had medical knowledge etc.
And to top it all off, some evolutionists
agree that DNA studies have shown it's likely
Neanderthals bred with modern humans 
meaning, if they did,
they themselves must have been fully human.
And that was our question today - Were Neanderthals
fully human?
Well once again, the honest evolutionist must
concede that the creationist position based
on the Word of God, was the correct the one
all along.
Hey folks, Calvin here – If you’ve been
watching this program for a while now, have
been blessed by the content, understand the
importance of biblical authority, and have
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Our goal is to equip the average believer
to be able to share the gospel more frequently
and effectively by making God’s creation
part of your everyday conversation.
Stay blessed!
