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Neanderthals "Had Sex" With Modern Man
According to Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Neanderthals and modern humans had sex across the species barrier. The professor has been using DNA retrieved from fossils to piece together the entire Neanderthal genome, and plans on publishing his findings soon. He recently told a conference that he was sure the two species had had sex, but still had questions as to how "productive" the relations had been. "What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" he said. "I'm sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite rigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence." What remains a mystery is what Paleolithic brewery provided the catalyst for these stone age hook-ups.
this where ginger people came from?
But wouldn't that mean that if they did actually produce offspring then by the definition they aren't separate species? I am betting they won't ever make the claim that they had offspring.
There was this odd quote someone showed me once from some book of the Bible (have to say in advance, I'm not a Bible studier, so I know not where it came from):
For in those days there were giants in the earth,
and they bred with the son of man...
Of course the Bible scholars will surely weigh in here and call me names and "educate me", but one wonders if ancient verbal histories might have more to them than it first seems.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The issue of introgression (gene flow from neanderthals to modern humans) is hugely important. It's a lot more important than the curiosity or oddity the Times article makes it out to be.
All the published studies looking for this introgression have been based on neanderthal mDNA. Since it doesn't undergo recombination, it's not a good marker, and the negative results so far are predictable and do not preclude gene flow. It'll be interesting to see Paabo's results. He's been working on getting nDNA data from neanderthal remains for a while now, and perhaps this is a hint that he's found some introgression.
Why it's important:
The small picture of why it's important is it would substantially redefine our family tree. We could refine our primate phylogeny.
The bigger, more hazy, and potentially earthshaking picture of why this could be important is that it doesn't take many viable pairings to get genes from one gene pool to another, and these genes could have been very important to our development. Modern humans and neanderthals were under many of the same environmental stresses but likely developed different adaptions to them. This includes behavior and cognition genes. As Stringer points out in the article, "in the last 10,000-15,000 years before they died out, around 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals were giving their dead complex burials and making tools and jewellery, such as pierced beads, like modern humans.” Proto-modern humans were smart. But neanderthals were also smart, potentially in different and complimentary ways. And perhaps it took a combination of proto-modern human and neanderthal genes to truly make the modern human mind. Our brains could be an example of 'hybrid vigor' on a grand scale.
So the big question mark is whether, given we can determine gene flow, if this hypothetical combination of proto-modern human and neanderthal cognitive adaptions could have led to the cultural explosion of ~30-50 thousand years ago. The biology is plausible and the timing's right. The data's still out, but it's coming in. Odder hypotheses have come true.
The neanderthals were close enough to modern humans that in my own opinion, it is possible that humans intermingled socially with them however, it was also my understanding that their DNA was distinct enough from ours to make them unable to interbreed and thus a separate species. Genetic markers in the million base sequence that has been reconstructed so far indicate that they fall significantly outside of typical variation for modern humans.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
All we need to do now is to take that DNA, splice it back together with human 'junk' DNA and breed Neanderthals for the next great Disney theme park! Instead of being entertained by people walking around in giant suits pretending to be cartoon characters, it could be the greatest edutainment center in the world!!
But seriously. People have sex across interspecies barriers all the time; animal, vegetable, mineral, it doesn't matter. I doubt that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals looked at each other and said, Hey, I can't have sex with you, you're obviously a different species! Probably they thought to themselves, Two arms, two legs, looks about right, the bits are in the right places, why not?
I've always sort of nursed a theory... that maybe Adam and Eve were Homo Sapiens and the Nephilim were Neanderthals. Or something like that. The idea is that Eden was a separate creation from Earth, and that on earth evolution really DID take place... but that after the Fall god turned man out of Eden into the earth.
Absurd of course, and could never be proven. But amusing to speculate.
Let the flames begin!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
You do not need any DNA analysis to figure that out. What do you think the troll did to the captured the princess, once he took her back to his mountain cave? And they did not call it the Stockholm syndrome if she ever was freed; it was called bergtatt (literally: taken into the mountain) or bewitched.
Unfortunately, the history is told by the winner; It would have been interesting to hear these fairytales as told by the Neanderthals.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Neanderthals primary were in Europe and the middle east. The 2 likley canditates of current ethnicicities with possible Neanderthal DNA would be Arabs and Caucasians.
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I suspect I do, based on my facial bone structure. I'm about 3/4 Germanic and 1/4 Scot. I have a very heavy brow, and my eyes are quite deep-set. I also have quite a bit more body hair than my friends, who are generally of English an Native American ancestry.
Learn about Photography Basics.
god's semen coated, gleaming rod sliding in and out of the tight hole of the teenage virgin mary
I don't know, but I think it's high time someone did something about those homo rhodesiensis bastards who are stealing all our jobs. Bloody non-union mammoth hunters.
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When was the last time you heard of someone crashing their car due to mechanical failure, in or out of warranty? And I mean actual failure ('the suspension arm broke', or 'brakes failed' or whatever) rather than just "I need something to blame for my incompetence". I'm trying but I can't think of any real examples. The only case that comes to mind is that one time that the wheel came off dad's car because the garage only finger-tightened the nuts...
Another point is that compared to falling from building-type altitudes, the speeds that we travel at in cars are quite fast. The classic example is that hitting a brick wall at 100km/h is the same as being dropped nose-first off a 10 story building.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
...and champagne was invented by pro-magnum man.
But to alow regular people access to those vehicles would cause far more problems than it's worth. They can barely stay on a road, you think they're going to fare better in the air?
I think the way flying cars would work is that you get into and say "Take me to work/home/wherever" and then after that it would navigate by GPS and talking to the other cars / central airtraffic control servers to avoid collisions. You'd need radar too to avoid cars that had a mechanical or software problem but there would not be any way for the 'driver' to do any driving.
So essentially there's be a protocol that made sure that working vehicles had time to detect and avoid non working ones as they glided to the ground.
The odd thing is that it would be easier to do this in 3D because you can effectively stack 'roads' on top of each other as high as you like. And you could even have more advanced protocols higher up, much like as higher frequencies became technically feasible it was possible to mandate more advanced modulation methods in radio. You can't do that on a conventional 2D road, and it would be hard to support a mixed environment where some cars were on various types of autopilot and some were manually driven.
Politically it would be very hard to ban manually driven cars on conventional roads and require autopilot, but for something new and cool like flying cars you could just license different height ranges for different protocols. There's be compliance tests too, but you need those for regular cars. I imagine flying cars would look a bit like a microlight aircraft but with some sort of autopilot and probably a clever safety system so they would glide and/or parachute to safety should they have problems. The other cars would detect this an avoid them on the way down. The normal autopilot system would basically make sure that there was enough space between vehicles to make sure this process was safe.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I heard that as well, and it would be consistent with the current hypothesis of Spain being the last hold out of Neanderthal populations. However, I can't stress enough that what we consider 'ethnicity' has no real correspondence to actual genetics.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I also have a heavy brow and deep set eyes, although I am not very hairy. I am also 1/4 Scottish but I think the rest of my ancestry is (distantly, i.e. a few centuries according to my grandfathers research) central/eastern European.
I don't think the heavy brow is a neanderthal trait. Your skull would be a very distinct shape if you were: http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/~zolli/CAP/comparingNeand.htm
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'm an orthopaedic surgeon (fix bones, replace hips, etc) and the skeletal differences in the extremeties, and axial (central) skeleton are substantial. HUGE flaired rib cage - much more lung volume and abdominal protection. Hips much more of a varus angle than ours ( are closer to a right angle - most humans are around 135 deg), and also more offset in their hips. Broader pelvis -hell all the bones just appear "beefier" - I'm guessing these guys were strong as all hell. Even the spine seems re-inforced compared to modern humans, who appear much sleeker.
Neanderthal = power weight lifter.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens = long distance runner.
..........FULL STOP.