We Are Not Related

mao che minh writes "From Pravda.ru - German and American geneticists recently discovered that the neanderthal has nothing to do with modern day man's genealogy. I figured that the lack of a genetic relationship between the two species was already well known, especially when you consider the empirical evidence compiled thus far that concludes that cromagnon man and neaderthal coexisited. I suppose that the geneticists aim to put the story to bed with their DNA research."

Comments

Correction

[master_xemu]

Just for referance there is no such thing as "Cro-Magnon Man". Cromagnon was a site in France where modern human remains were found. Cromagnon man is simply Homo sapien sapien, my wife is an Anthropologist and jumps all over me when I use the term "Cro-Magnon".

Re:credibility of the story

[Henry V .009]

Wrong. They extracted DNA from a Neanderthal skeleton years ago--do a Google search. The conclusion was that we are different species.

Re:Hard Evidence Suggests Otherwise

[Lars Arvestad]

From what I understand, the current knowledge is well captured by a quote from Archaeology:

If Neandertals made a significant genetic contribution to modern humans, similarities should exist between DNA of Neandertals and that of people from Europe, where the Neandertals persisted the longest. Pääbo and his colleagues compared the Neandertal DNA to that from five modern populations, but it proved no closer to DNA from modern Europeans than to that from four other groups. While this does not rule out the possibility of Neandertal and modern human mixing, it suggests that the Neandertal genetic contribution to modern gene pools, if any, was small.

Svante Pääbo is a respected expert on ancient DNA, and was the first (whose student...) sequenced Neandertal DNA.