This much older modern human has the same fraction of Neanderthal DNA as modern humans today.

Think about it.

We haven't seen any ancient Modern Humans that have a different degree of Neanderthal ancestry.

When Modern Humans first bred with Neanderthals the offspring were 50/50. If these F1s bred with each other predominantly from then on you would end up with a new breeding population that was roughly 50/50 in heritage. If the F1s predominantly bred with Modern Humans, then the Neanderthan portion would be cut to 25% in the F2, and if the process repeats it is 12.5% in the F3, etc.

This process stops when there are effectively no more pure blood Modern Humans, that the Neanderthal genome has diffused evenly across the entire population. But subsequent re-encounters would inject new Neanderthal DNA and restart the process.

We haven't yet seen any evidence of this history yet. Even 45,000 years ago it was "ancient history" and epoch that passed many, many generations earlier.

If you were complaining about the "Cro Magnon" concept you would be on solid ground. That turned out to be an imaginary construct. Neanderthals and Denisovans though definitely form a genetically defined group much more divergent from modern human populations than are found between the most divergent populations among modern humans (defined roughly by the San on one hand and everyone who is not African on the other). That said there is only 0.3% variation across the entire Neanderthal-Denisovan-Modern Human super-group. The Neanderthals and Denisovans were real separate breeding populations for hundreds of thousands of years, but still clearly part of one human species.

Just addressing the example given - the "Cro-Magnon" concept and term has been entirely abandoned by science. The problem was that there was never a definition of what a "Cro-Magnon" supposedly was. No distinguishing set of physical characteristics, no distinctive physical culture, and now with our powerful genetic analysis tools - no distinctive genetic pattern. Their range of variation is within that of modern humans, and supposing they were a subspecies would be as well founded as declaring "Samoans" a subspecies since they are, like the "Cro Magnon" physically more robust on average than modern Europeans.

Mod parent up!

I haven't used it recently, but years ago I found the Matlab language and programming environment to be terrible - very primitive (which is why I haven't used it since). Sure, it has great libraries - it should considering the cost.

Mathematica is a wonderful programming environment, with equally powerful libraries (in many areas, far more powerful), and they have brought the cost of entry way down.

Good that you mentioned seawater extraction. If we did that for uranium then we would have a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. If we increase nuclear power 20-fold, to 250% of world electricity production today, it is still 500 years. If we implement breeding (I suspect we could get the bugs worked out by then) we are back up to a 50,000 year supply.

Where is the necessity of thorium?

Where did all the energy go? Is solar energy tainted and unusable for making new solar panels? The energy payback time for current solar technology is 3 years, and steadily dropping. It should reach 1 year over the next decade.

How? They don't exist.

Mod this guy up!

You have hit the nail on the head.

No conspiracy of hippies is keeping U.S. nuclear power off the table. Commercial ventures can get licenses if they want (and have). The issue is straight-up capitalism and profit-making business decisions -- the capital cost of a nuclear plant is very high so it is an unattractive investment as long as coal or natural gas are available.

"Viable" roughly means "practical", the first step for something to be practical is to be able to do it. Did you read page you linked to? It admits that "Humanity hasn't figured out how to harness it yet." Actually that is a half-truth. We haven't learned how to harness convention tritum+deuterium fusion yet. But we at least can demonstrate it in a laboratory. With aneutronic thermonuclear fusion can't do it at all under any circumstances!

This isn't in a class with fairies, unicorns and pixie dust since it is based on physical principles, but it is in the same class as those elevators that take us to the Moon.

We are better off restricting energy plans to technologies that we know can be implemented this century.

Good that you brought up seawater extraction technology. Using that we have enough uranium, even just using once-through burning, for something like a 10,000 year supply at current consumption rates. Increase nuclear power ten-fold (125% of current world electricity consumption) and it is still 1,000 years. If we implement breeding (we could get the bugs worked out in a few centuries I imagine) then we are back up 100,000 years or so.

Why does thorium need to enter the picture?

Say the guy slapping the name "welfare" on every social expenditure the government makes (including earned retirement by the military).

Maybe you should to extra distance and call it "Marxism". "Satanism" is also available.

That's right, if you take away nearly 10% of an already tiny income, and slice it into small enough chunks that turns it into pocket change. Heck $67 a month!? Well, really its only about 10 cents and hour! Not even a penny every five minutes! That's really nothing at all!

And besides - its just liquor and smokes money anyway! No matter how poor they are I know they still have too much because (I imagine) they are boozing and guzzling up a storm! Bad poor person for having vices in my imagination! They deserve to be punished for it!

And since they have tiny margin of stability they might topple from anyway, why not cut out another good chunk? After all if it is like a guy dangling by a rope - it is obviously stronger than it needs to be, and you can slice away a bit of it and he will still be fine (this can logically be applied indefinitely...).

Reducing poverty is not controversial. It is just that the rich feel that this should only be done by transfers of wealth from the Middle Class.

(And if their own burden drops a tad as "collateral damage" its just sweet candy that blamelessly fell into their pocket - seriously this is how Flat tax proponents effectively treat the matter.).

The "Trickle Up Theory"! OMG - I never thought I would see someone propose this counterpart of the "Trickle Down Theory" (except as a joke).

Yes indeed! The ideal system is don't tax the rich, but heavily tax the poor, and the exploding piles of cash at the top will motivate their owners to (avoidably!) shovel it out to the poor in salary!

This is absolutely true. But...

Taxation is the only mechanism that I can identify that exists on a scale to address inequality.

Taxation to fund government operations is the one essential use of taxing power - it has to be done, and only bizarre reality-detached legislators really believe that most government functions can be defunded wholesale (but we have had quite a few of those in the House recently).

If you aren't taxing to fund some government function or service, then you talking about direct cash redistribution. I don't have a problem with that but, like a tax on capital, it is hard to see how it could ever be implemented in the face of the effective veto the rich have over overall U.S. taxing policy and their venomous hatred of even the mildly progressive overall tax system under which they are rapidly increasing in wealth.

[Citation needed]