Was actually looking into this and so did a search to see what was already talked about, Found the below quote on another thread after finding it on the CD for myself...stunning to me as I still thought of Neanderthal man as a hairy monkey man or a complete fabrication, and here is what appears to be a twist from the WT that I never realized all my years in.
What I found most interesting was the bolded section (by me)
*** w64 10/1 pp. 588-589 pars. 21-23 The Bible and Creation in the Light of Modern Science ***
23 But what of those so-called “prehistoric” men one frequently hears about? Some of such fossil remains are not human at all, but are animal. Others are simply varieties of the human family who were living at the same time “modern-type” man was, just as today there are many sizes and shapes in different living peoples. The Neanderthal man was at one time regarded as “prehistoric,” an ancestor of modern man in the evolution scale, but note what an encyclopedia now says: “Neanderthal man cannot be regarded as an ancestor of modern man. Neanderthal man and men of the modern type . . . must be looked upon as descendants of a common ancestor.”
This in context was the WT trying to demonstate how wrong evoltution is compared to creation, but perhaps they shot the whole Adam and Eve thing in the foot...
Now, to my way of thinking, what the WT said without saying back then (and nothing seems to have updated it) is that Adam and Eve must have had, aside from Cain and Able and unnamed daughters, also given birth to Neanderthals.
The Bible and JWs would not hold that there was an unknown Homo Sapien pair walking around giving birth to 'modern man' and 'neanderthal man', that then neantherthal died out leaving modern man, ie; Adam and Eve.
So the biblical and JW explanation must mean that Adam and Eve gave birth to Neanderthal man as well as the recorded children of Genesis. Both just enough the same (homo Sapien) but geneticaly also different enough for one to live on and the other not...
So Genesis just got buried under a mountain of shit...either Adam and Eve were not the first Homo Sapiens or if they were, they bore Neanderthal man.
In an effort to prove 'modern science' wrong didn't they instead prove genesis to be wrong?
thoughts?
Oz of the still learning class