DNA Analysis Probes the End of Human-Neanderthal Sex

An anonymous reader writes "Modern Europeans may have interbred with Neanderthals as recently as 37,000 years ago, after modern humans with advanced stone tools expanded out of Africa, according to a new study. In an attempt to understand why the Neanderthals are more closely related to people from outside of Africa, researchers from Harvard and the Max Planck Institute estimated that while the last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans may have occurred 37,000 to 86,000 years ago, it is most likely that it occurred 47,000 to 65,000 years ago."

Comments

snoo-snoo from damn neanderthal women

[rubycodez]

raped my great-great-.......great grandaddy! and he liked it!

Re:snoo-snoo from damn neanderthal women

[anwaya]

You know what they say:

"Once you go Neanderthalensis, you'll never go back-a-lensis!"

(Fine. You find a rhyme for 'Neanderthalensis')

Next time you rhyme 'Neanderthalensis'
Leave that task to an amanuensis,
Or someone who doesn't sit on fences:
They'd just still need to know what your sense is.

The last sex between Neanderthals and humans

[2phar]

the last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans may have occurred 37,000 to 86,000 years ago

Maria Shriver begs to differ.

Re:The last sex between Neanderthals and humans

[__aaltlg1547]

Funny, but Maria is probably as Neanderthal as Arnold. What interests me is that the Neanderthal genes never made it back into Sub-Saharan Africa, which means that some Africans remained mostly separated from non-Africans for a quite a long time. Same goes for Micronesians and Austrailians, who have Denisovan genes that the rest of humanity doesn't have.

And I guess this explains how it is we managed to end up with noticeably tweaked physical features. If Europeans and Mid-East people had been exchanging a lot of genes with Sub-Saharan Africans (for example if there had been a lot of trade between Africa and Europe or if there had been migrations into Africa) you'd expect there to be less difference in skin and eye color and more variation of hair curliness among Africans.

Had there been more trade or immigration to Africa, Africans might look more like African-Americans, who have a mixture of African, European and other ancestry.

Re:The last sex between Neanderthals and humans

[K. S. Kyosuke]

the last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans may have occurred 37,000 to 86,000 years ago

Maria Shriver begs to differ.

You got that mixed up, Neanderthals are from the past and Terminators are from the future.

Last sex 37,000-86,000 years ago

[turkeyfeathers]

And that's still better than most Slashdot readers.

reproduction != sex

[khallow]

Humanity never had successful reproduction with sheep, but I wouldn't go as far as to claim as a result that we've never had sex with sheep.

I do wonder what changed after the alleged period when occasional reproduction occurred.

Re:reproduction != sex

[JustOK]

lift their tail, and you'll see it.

Re:reproduction != sex

[theskipper]

It's Sunday, what the heck: (Source: http://www.squidoo.com/sheepjokes#module33629552)

A New Zealander buys several sheep, hoping to breed them for wool. After several weeks, he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant, and calls a vet for help. The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination.

The New Zealander doesn't have the slightest idea what this means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant. The vet tells him that they will stop standing around and will, instead, lay down and wallow in the grass when they are pregnant.

The Man hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep. So, he loads the sheep into his truck, drives them out into the woods, has sex with them all, brings them back and goes to bed.

Next morning, he wakes and looks out at the sheep. Seeing that they are all still standing around, he concludes that the first try didn't take, and loads them in the truck again. He drives them out to the woods, bangs each sheep twice for good measure, brings them back and goes to bed.

Next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still just standing around. One more try, he tells himself, and proceeds to load them up and drive them out to the woods. He spends all day shagging the sheep and, upon returning home, falls listlessly into bed.

The next morning, he cannot even raise himself from the bed to look at the sheep. He asks his wife to look out and tell him if the sheep are laying in the grass. "No," she says, "they're all in the truck and one of them's honking the horn."

Re:reproduction != sex

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I do wonder what changed after the alleged period when occasional reproduction occurred.

Not just successful reproduction, but offspring whose genetics was carried forward into current populations to be detected by such research.

One possibility is the two branches diverged enough that crosses muled out. Another is that some crosses might still have remained fertile but the populations resulting from crosses after the cutoff date might have later died out without crossing back into those lines that did survive. (Perhaps cultural values or differing ideas of beauty led to a separation of these two branches of Humanity.)

Re:Racist Idiocy

[MightyMartian]

I don't think that taxonomy has been in use for a long time. I haven't heard any researcher refer to Neandertals as a subspecies of H. sapens for many years. Nor would it make much sense considering they are likely both daughter species of H. erectus.

Re:Racist Idiocy

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Except that Neanderthals were also homo Sapiens. But they were more primitive in their technology, for whatever reason.

Because they knew what a real woman needed. Real men, with proper real tools, solid Mousterian hand axes. Real woman has no need for the effeminate Aurignacian blades, those are for pussies.

Re:A Brief History of the World

[Anonymous Coward]

A really interesting Slashdot phenomenon is while attempting to be all scientificy and stuff and being strong advocates of Darwinian natural selection, don't seem to really grasp the implications of the concept. No species tries to maintain equilibrium. Equilibrium is forced upon them.

Re:Racist Idiocy

[ColdWetDog]

If two individuals give fertile descendency, aren't they of the same species?

Welcome to the Species Problem.

tl;dr - It's complicated.

Re:Racist Idiocy

[crunchygranola]

... Before that, Northern and Western Europe was a backwater and had been since before the dawn of civilization.

Ever heard of Alexander of Macedon? You know...the guy who conquered half the world in the 4th century BC? Yeah, that was over two millennia ago. Maybe you should go take an Intro to Western Civ class, clown.

And when did Alexander of Macedon ever set foot in Northern or Western Europe? He himself thought he had conquered half the world, but we have learned a little more geography in the last 2400 years. Most of Greece, most of Turkey, part of the eastern half of the Middle East and Pakistan is not half the world.

Maybe Ringling Brothers is holding auditions AC.

Re:Racist Idiocy

[Geeky]

No, the Neanderthals liked technology, but invented patents so that Ug got exclusive rights to fire and refused to license it to Og. There was also some nastiness over whether the stone tools could have rounded edges.

Humans freely ripped off Neanderthal technology. The Neanderthals tried to take them to court, but the humans had not yet evolved enough to understand the concept of intellectual property rights so just ignored them.

Eventually the Neanderthals consumed all of their resources in a massive lawsuit that left the earth scorched and the humans scratching their heads and telling themselves that whatever happened in the future, they wouldn't ever be so stupid as to repeat those mistakes.