When I discovered that my weekly dose of Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs had been replaced with a caveman special, I was...nonplussed, but after some diabolical swearing, I decided that poor brain-food was better than none. After all, it couldn't possibly be worse than the dinosaur special two years ago which said "some dinosaurs digest with the assistance of stones in their intestines called 'gastropods.'" (The correct word is gastrolith: a gastropod is a snail.)

O how lamentably in err twas I.

Now I'm sure that there has to be something scientific going on in the paleoanthropology field, but what Discovery Channel aired, it is not. Even by subjecting it to moderately critical scrutiny, one can see that the assertions are at best quite poorly founded when alternative explanations exist, and at worst are arguments from silence totally derived from evolutionary dogma.

The program consisted of crude drawings of Neanderthal cavepersons (in this day and age, one must be gender neutral, after all)  having coprolites beat out of them by how much better homo sapiens were, in tool, thought, and form.

The cloistered-minded theist skeptic in me started screaming right about now: "You and what samples?" he  pried.

Well, as is, they did make one cryptic reference to how few samples there are: "It is difficult to draw conclusions when all of Neanderthal and early human remains could fit into a pickup truck." (the preceeding quote was done from memory: it may be off by a few words.)

To put how insignificant that sample size is in context, I'm thinking of another prehistoric creature we know quite a bit about which -like early hominids- had quite a large range, but unlike homo sapiens, all fossils of this creature are 65 million years old plus. We would have difficulties putting all of the samples of this species into an 80 car freight train.

Now, maybe using Iguanadon is a bit unfair: it is generally considered to be the most successful land animal of all time, but consider the following:

1. Hominids (homo sapiens, at least) have a long history of burying their dead. Iguanadon had a long history of being eaten. Granted that decay is going to occur to both, I wonder which is more conducive to (at least partial) fossil formation.

2. The oldest hominid fossil is about 7 million years old, the youngest Iguanadon fossil is 65 million years old.  Erosion must be content-selective.

3. Hominids have tool effects, like hand axes. Iguanadon did not.

Now, with all this in mind, am I the only one suspecting that another solution is in order?

The program also had experts trying to sequence DNA from Neanderthal bones. They (the experts) noted how difficult it was to sequence genes from a fossil that had been intruded by bacteria and fungi. The program then concluded (without quoting an expert, I noted) that while Chimpanzes are 97%  similar to humans, Neanderthals appear to have been much closer: 99.9% similar. Close enough for the program to briefly consider interbreeding.

One expert did note that the differences between humans is about 1 per thousand (I don't recall any unit being given) while the difference between Neanderthals and humans appears to have been 2 or 3 per thousand.

Before I go any further -not to put any one in particular on the spot- I would like a geneticist to tell me that a heavily damaged and very old sample can yield results to within 0.1% accuracy in the first place. I'm willing to wager that the results are within the study's margin of error (which is why they didn't get a geneticist on camera: he would be saying that the sample was indistinguishable from human remains) but I digress.

Then my degenerate theist mind struck at an alternative explanation: it would explain the present fossils just as well for them to be diseased modern species (human or ape) but this would also explain why there are so few fossils: there aren't that many of what you are looking for.

Now, I know that diseases can do some funny things to the body: Acromegaly and Cushings appear to run in my family, and I can tell how they can distort the body just from thumbing through a family album.

Now, determining which is the better solution is a decision I leave to you, but regardless of which you choose, I hope that you can understand why I have come to the conclusion I have.