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Neanderthal Genes Found In All Non-African Populations
Med-trump writes "Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Now scientists have identified a piece of Neanderthal DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome and conclude that this haplotype is present because of mating between our ancestors and Neanderthals. The study was published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution."
The Neanderthals didn't become extinct so much as they merged with H. sapiens.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Somehow I doubt that telling those white supremacists that they're the ones descended from Neanderthals and that the Africans are the only group lacking Neanderthal DNA would do anything to change their perspectives.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I thought it was "homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis miscegenated and the latter genes still exist in humans" in January.
Now it's "if you aren't 100% African, you're part Neanderthal."
So.. Just how "different" are/were they? It sounds to me like we are calling neanderthals non homosapiens when in reality they are no more different from us than say a tall blond Scandinavian is from a short Asian.. Or a chihuahua from a great dane.
The human genome contains all kinds of junk that isn't expressed, including code for various viruses. However, that does not make one a virus any more than it makes one a neanderthal.
I think it's proof that most of us slashdot geeks are such social basket cases even our ancestors had to move to a foreign land and get a neanderthal to date them.
Those slashdotters who are from Africa get a free pass on this one.
As far as I understood it, it was that the evidence suggested - to some degree of certainty - that the genes of all extra-African races were different from sub-Saharan African races to a level that agreed with Neanderthal sequences. Obviously the errors were large - and acknowledged in the studies - but so far as I understood the reasoning for the implications, Homo Sapiens was reputed to have interbred with Homo Neanderthalis at least in the Middle East at about the point that we left Africa, simply because all of us who aren't predominantly sub-Saharan African have the same gene sequence as some recently-sequence Neanderthal fossils.
So far as that goes, fair enough. I remember reading a lot of that kind of thing a good few months back. And a natural implication is that anyone who isn't sub-Sahran African probably has Neanderthal in them. (Entertainingly, of course, many sub-Saharans also will. This is due to humans, err, interacting constantly and repeatedly and the effects propogating through populations. But the studies took that kind of simple-minded thing into account, of course.)
What was that?
I'm sorry, I can't read when 6-digit UIDs post.
One of the problems here in saying whether Neanderthal's are a different species to Homo Sapiens is that the word species is poorly defined. It's actually been a problem since Darwin's day, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem gives an idea of how long we've been arguing this. Personally if I feel if they were routinely successfully breeding with homo sapiens then calling them a separate species may be a bit of a stretch.
You missed the part where they've found evidence that most humans have Neanderthal genes.
I always wondered why the assumption was genocide, when human communities tend to favor marriage to members of adjacent groups, and by most accounts I've read, Neanderthals would have been almost indistinguishable from anatomically modern humans, anyway. It just always seemed to make the most sense that the Neanderthals would have simply been absorbed by the larger group.
how would they be almost indistinguishable? They were more muscular, stockier, and had very prominent orbital ridges.
Eh, sonny? Speak up! My hearing aid batteries have given up, and I need my grandson to take me to Walgreens on account of my rheumatiz actin' up.
Quiet down youngster.