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Neanderthal Genome to be Sequenced
Aneurysm writes "A project launched by the Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology will sequence the genome of Neanderthal man. The sequencing project may find out important information, such as whether they cross-bred with modern humans. Previous DNA tests have tested this theory, and found it unlikely. Could this be the start of a Pleistocene park?"
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The genome is ALL the genetic material, both transcribed genes (which make RNA molecules and then proteins) and the so-called "junk DNA". The latter, it turns out, is not remotely "junk", but contains important regulatory sequences which control gene activation/deactivation and the physical structure of the chromosomes.
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Ahem! Lucy was not a hoax!
Try this link, I believe the doctor is in . . .
http://www.asu.edu/clas/iho/lucy.html
Except that research shows that the human gene pool has a rather significant bottleneck, wherein we all descend from a small set of individuals not to far in the past. There is so little genetic variation in humans that if some of us have Neanderthal genes, then all of us do.
No, the genetic bottleneck occured far before homo sapiens escaped Africa and made contact with Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East. H. Sapiens only reached Europe around 45,000 years ago. The genetic bottleneck occured 150,000 years ago or so in sub-Saharan Africa when humanity almost went extinct.
Thus, Asians and especially sub-Saharan Africans would show no Neanderthal genes, while caucasians would, if there was interbreeding.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Andre the giant suffered from a disease called acromegaly, which caused him to continually grow, such that the proportions of his body took a constant toll on it. Near his death he was in constant pain, and eventually died of heart failure because the muscle simply couldn't keep up with the size of his body. Most people who were diagnosed with the disease in his time didn't live to 40. Saying he was like a neanderthol just because he had a funny shaped head is incredibly stupid and closed minded. The man suffered from an illness which gave him a short, painful life. That he was able to capitolize on the outward appearance given to him by the disease to make his life into a positive one is a testament to Andre's spirit.
The problem is that almost everything went extinct when we moved on in. Whether we directly hunted them down or just disrupted the ecosystem/carried disease/etc is a good question, but wherever humans went, large fauna died off in huge numbers. Some of Australia's megafauna may be an exception, but it's just that: an exception. Places where humans didn't get to early on had megafauna last longer - for example, Wrangel Island had mammoths holdouts till the time of the Pharaohs.
Neanderthals were taller than we are
No.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
'Thals don't figure prominently until the fourth book in the series, "Something Rotten," where they turn out to be instrumental in a high-stakes world cup croquet tournament.
All four books are a hell of a lot of fun, and approach the level of wit and humor of Douglas Adams. Recommended.
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OTOH neanderthal mithocondrial DNA is sampled and found to be singificantly different from Homo Sapiens'. That means we have no neanderthal grandmothers, which makes interbreeding theory *very* unlikely.
A remote possibility is neandethal females were unable to carry half-HS offspring but HS females could. That is unlikely for at least three reasons:
a) The distance between m-DNAs suggest the difference between n-DNA too great to interbreed
b) There is no mechanism we know of that would make neandarthal mothers unable to carry half-breeds while HS mothers can.
c) And finally, I made the theory on the spot and I'm not even a biologist
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Here's the second case -- IIRC the first paper was in Cell, but I can't find it.
How do they know it's neanderthol and not from something else?
I'm no anthropologist but I think that Neanderthal skeletons are pretty unmistakeable to the trained eye.
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I thought gravity was a Law, not a theory.
Scientific Law: This is a statement of fact meant to explain, in concise terms, an action or set of actions. It is generally accepted to be true and univseral, and can sometimes be expressed in terms of a single mathematical equation. Scientific laws are similar to mathematical postulates. They don't really need any complex external proofs; they are accepted at face value based upon the fact that they have always been observed to be true.
Some scientific laws, or laws of nature, include the law of gravity, the law of thermodynamics, and Hook's law of elasticity.
Hypothesis: This is an educated guess based upon observation. It is a rational explanation of a single event or phenomenon based upon what is observed, but which has not been proved. Most hypotheses can be supported or refuted by experimentation or continued observation.
Theory: A theory is more like a scientific law than a hypothesis. A theory is an explanation of a set of related observations or events based upon proven hypotheses and verified multiple times by detached groups of researchers. One scientist cannot create a theory; he can only create a hypothesis.
In general, both a scientific theory and a scientific law are accepted to be true by the scientific community as a whole. Both are used to make predictions of events. Both are used to advance technology.
The biggest difference between a law and a theory is that a theory is much more complex and dynamic. A law governs a single action, whereas a theory explains a whole series of related phenomena.
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Yeah, umm no.
Worms and some bacteria have DNA strands with 300 times the information of humans, most of it junk, and it doesn't mean anything. The junk is just left in there after reproduction. You've got to remember that although we've even gone to space, a place no worm could imagine going, we haven't reproduced as much as they have. Bacteria? Forget about it.
Really, get "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Great read, updated by Ann, wealth of insight into evolution.
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This seems the most likely explanation. The latest Neandertal remains found, from Gibraltar, indicate a population that had been pushed to the margins, and to such low numbers that they could not be sustained. We can only guess at how well Moderns and Neandertals got along, though my understanding is that, towards the end, there was some innovation in their toolkits, suggesting they may have been very different from us, but still capable of attempting to catch on to the new wave.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The 10% that we consider useful is also the most useful in terms of comparative genetics. Coding regions tend to have the highest evolutionary selective pressure to not mutate/evolve in a fashion that is completly random or detrimental.
We are beginning to move into the era where non-coding regions are becoming important as well (enhancer, promoter regions, etc.), but they provide more fine tuned differences in the species (transcription factor binding efficiencies, etc.). (I use fine tuned in a very broad sense here, as it is entirely possible that one of these fined tuned process can cause an event where the gene gets entirely turned off permanantly-- as is the case with stem cell differentation)
One thing to consider is that genes are easy to compare and we understand coding regions better than non-coding regions in part because we can actually visualize how the coding DNA is going to work/look like in it's protein representation (translational suppression, etc. aside). We know that an insertion/deletion/mutation causes a change in the coding regions, which causes a change in the codon of the protein, which in turn causes a change in how the protein/folds and henceforth its function. Non-coding regions are difficult, they represent possible binding reactions between thousands of other transciption factors (genes), and there is a large lack of understanding in how the genes effect chromosome structure. We just don't know enough about the non-coding regions to understand how similarities/differences in the non-coding genome are affected in evolution.
The best analogy I can give is it's like comparing two different car. The coding regions would be things that are very tractable for us, the color, the number of doors, the type of car, the engine, etc. The non coding regions would be like trying to understand the wiring/programming behind the engine with knowing very little engineering. Sure, how it's wired and programmed is important, but saying that two red wires seem to be connected in a similar fashion means that they must function similarly often falls short. You don't know where those wires run to , and you don't fully understand how the components that they connect to fit into the big picture of how the engine works.
I wouldn't be suprised if in time these non-coding regions become more important for comparative genomics in the long run, but it will take some time before we get to that point.
The time period between human arrival and extinction is hard to quantify exactly, but is likely several thousand years. With few native human-infecting diseases, no human-aware predators, and huge potential unused foodstocks, human populations can explode rapidly (do the math; assume three children make it to maturity for every two adults, on average 20 years apart, for 1000 years, you get the over-the-top figure of 600 million times as many people as arrived. Humans grow to fill the available resources very well :) ).
Even still, the "hunting every last one" concept can be hard for many to swallow. A more commonly accepted notion is that it's a combination of factors; unfavorable climate, heavy hunting, ecosystem distruption (both flora and fauna), introduction of new diseases and parasites, etc.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
"In the last 50 years or so, Europeans have become on average about 2 cm taller than Americans. I'd guess (though I'm not sure) that Americans eat more meat than Europeans."
I don't believe that such averages can be attributed to diet/nutrition/prenatal/obesity. Compare the level of immigration to the United States over the past 50 years from Asian countries versus how many Asians moved to Europe over that same period of time. There's your explanation.
I mean, just look around and see how "white" Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans are all getting taller than the prior generations. I'm of that first category (and partly of the last) and I'm 2 inches taller than my father, who in turn is 2 inches taller than his father, and the mothers have all been around the same height too.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
We don't have to hunt everyone. If the large animal only has offspring once every 2-3 years, takes 10 years to become sexually mature, and has a litter of one; you don't have to kill too many until you put a large dent in their reproductive rate.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
No. Neanderthal man gots its name because the first specimen was found in the Neanderthal (Neander Valley) in Germany.
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the more likely we are to *NOTICE* that it went extinct
We notice animals that survive, too. Smaller animals have higher survival rates, plain and simple.
Very few (no?) large animals survived the extinction
The K-T extinction had only a slightly higher megafauna extinction rate than that wrought during human expansion. The extinction during the last ice age was the largest, among megafauna, in the past 65 million years. The K-T extinction was a lot worse on small animals than the Pliestocene extinction, although it still focused on megafauna.
Even if it is true that many large animals died off around 10K BC
You better believe it; it's about as close to a scientific consensus as you can get.
This is still perfectly consistant with the ice age
That it is not. As mentioned previously:
1) Far worse ice ages have occurred in the past, without anything at all like what we saw at the end of the Pliestocene. This extinction was the worst since the K-T extinction 65 million years prior - a huge amount of time (and ice ages!).
2) The extinction timings varied around the world, and were not timed to regional ice age variations; the only correlating factor was the arrival of humans.
3) There is one place in the world that was strangely unaffected by megafauna extinctions: Africa. The place where humans and the native animals coevolved.
About the only serious evidence-based argument against the "humans did it" line of argument is that there's a paucity of fossil evidence of sudden dieoffs. Yet, it's pretty clear to most that this is a rather weak argument.
For one, you're looking for a single stratum that in most places would last only a decade; you can expect that stratum to not exist in the vast majority of the world. Secondly, it is almost impoissible to find the remains of the thousands of modern elephants killed by poachers and in herd culls in Africa. The simple fact is that fossilization is a very rare event, and the only reason that we have so many fossils total is because they accumulate over geological time periods. The fossil evidence shows what you would expect to find: in each place, the animals abruptly dissapear from the fossil record at almost the same time that humans arrive, irregardless of climate or other such factors in the particular region.
We've even watched this happen in modern times; read up about the Moa of New Zealand, for starters. New Zealand, if I recall correctly, has about the land area of New Mexico, and is incredibly rugged terrain; hardly an "easy" place to cause an extinction. Yet, the Maori did it with extreme skill. The only large quantities of butchered Moa fossils are in relatively small Maori campsites. Odds are miniscule that these campsites would preserve over geological time, let alone preserve and be rediscovered.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
We have not observed it happening and have not been able to perform an experiment to prove it.
You are obviously not a microbiologist dealing with antibiotic resistance issues...evolution in action!
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There is a good, albeit unpalatable, explanation for the genocide of other ethnic groups: genetic self interest. IIRC Dawkins makes a good case for this in The Selfish Gene.
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Ancient DNA is generally fragmented into pieces only a few hundred nucleotides long (in comparison to a total genome length of 3 billion). To reconstruct longer sequences, a complete series of damaged fragments is needed, with enough overlap to connect them together. So in my opinion, even fairly short segments of around 100kb are far more effort than anyone is likely to put into it.
On the other hand, this reconstruction of the genome from short fragments is exactly the "shotgun" approach that Craig Venter successfully used in the Human Genome Project. With enough computerization, who knows?
--John (John Hawks Anthropology Weblog)