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20% of Neanderthal Genome Survives In Humans
vinces99 writes "A substantial fraction of the Neanderthal genome persists in modern human populations. A new analysis (abstract) of 665 people from Europe and East Asia shows that more than 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome survives in the DNA of this contemporary group, whose genetic information is part of the 1,000 Genomes Project."
Another study published today (abstract) finds that Neanderthal genes are present in some parts of our genome that we've found to be important. Some of the genes influence fertility and skin pigment, and others actually increase our susceptibility to diseases like diabetes and lupus. The researchers are now taking these known genetic markers and seeing if they correlate with any other health conditions.
You replicate those genes by 3d printing, and offer them for bitcoins, and that's how you end up on slashdot.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'm surprised it's not higher.
I may be 20% neanderthal, but I'm statistically 0.5% Genghis Khan...
These genes do not exist in humanity in general, only specific racial groups. They are completely absent from African populations. Similar to milk digestion. Being able to digest milk in adulthood is a feature found almost only in European race populations, because it is allowed by a genetic mutation that occured in these populations 10,000 years ago. Most other racial groups are lactose intolerant after early childhood. Milk digestion in adulthood is certainly a huge advantage and became much favored with cattle domestication in Europe.
The insertion of neanderthal genes happened around 30,000 years ago immediately after early humans left africa, after that there were 30,000 years of divergent evolution and branching that gave us the geographically distinct racial groups.
Neanderthals are barely a separate species.
They're homo neanderthalensis, while modern man is homo sapiens sapiens. The immediate predecessor to modern humans is homo sapiens idaltu, which is minutely different than us. While a simple majority of paleontologists classify Neanderthals as a separate species, there's a significant minority that advocate them as merely another subspecies (home sapiens neanderthalensis) being more correct.
Given that the ENTIRE Neanderthal genome differs from ours by 0.15% or less (we're about 2% different than our closest modern primate relative), I'm very surprised that the Homo-specific genome part is only 20% in common between Neanderthal and Modern Human. Particularly since it's now commonly accepted that they interbred with modern humans.
I think the 20% commonality (if it bears out) probably reinforces the "separate species" theory more than the "distinct subspecies" theory of the Homo genus family tree.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
What I find interesting is the only group that doesn't have Neanderthal genes are Africans. It almost sounds like Caucasians got their light skin and ability to handle the cold from Neanderthals and are hybrids while Africans are the only pure humans. Ironic.
From God's Roadmap:
Beta
Release version: Homo neanderthalensis
Build name: Adam
Release date: 4,569,770,000 years after cooling
Deprecated: 4,569,971,000 years after cooling
Stable
Release version: Homo sapiens
Build name: Eve
Release date: 4,569,800,000 years after cooling
Deprecated:
[Sigh] Still deciding. I mean, the codebase is starting to look a bit creaky in a few places, and they're starting to tinker with it themselves (they think it's open source - hah!). Inquisitive little so-and-so's can't leave well enough alone... They've noticed the legacy code from the previous build too - ick, some cruft in there. Very tempting to trash the lot and start again using AOP. Mind you I mightn't have to lift a finger if they don't stop blowing each other to smithereens.
[sigh] TODO: Take oort cloud inventory - look for something nice and big...
There's no such thing as more primitive in a genetic sense which makes it ridiculous in both cases. Anything alive today is the result of all the evolution that has taken place since the first bits of life and is therefore equally evolved.
Also, 20% is a lot, so we might as well call it human DNA. We own it now, its shapes us.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
For instance an average European has an average IQ of 105 compared to 70 in Africa. Though, the higher IQ is likely due to divergent racial evolution that occured well after the insertion of neanderthal genes...
Or it could be a matter of education, relative stress in childhood, and diet. Or it could be a matter of a cultural upbringing that doesn't value and train people in the types of reasoning favored by IQ tests. I'd like to see a test cataloging our relative abilities to navigate vast terrain, to remember and recite oral histories, to perform pattern recognition based on ability to identify wild plants, or just a simple ability to navigate complex social situations, for example. Or it could be a function of languages, since we already know that languages can affect things like the ability to recognize and categorize colors.
Have you ever read letters from American Civil War soldiers to their families back home? We're not talking a college education demographic by a long shot, but the eloquence and care of language in these letters is often breathtaking. Are we "dumber" than them as a populace for not being able to write like an average farm boy could 150 years ago? Or are we just trained for different uses of our brains.
IQ is a crappy measure of genetic superiority, because it fails to account for environment & upbringing, and it's heavily biased towards one particular culture's most valued intelligence traits.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not that I disagree but it's worth pointing out that the summary is a bit misleading. Europeans share these genes but africans do not and it's 20% of the .15% of the neaderthal genome that is distinct, obviously humans share a lot more than 20% of their DNA with neaderthals, we share a lot more than that with primates!
Not entirely. Evolution is most meaningfully measured in generations, not years. Those species that have averaged a more rapid average reproductive cycle since their ancestors parted ways with ours will have undergone more evolutionary iterations than us. Mice are in the lead pack among mammals. And bacteria leave even mice in the dust, even before you factor in the fact that for them sex is more like performing limited genetic engineering on themselves, allowing useful mutations to spread through the population without any reproduction occurring. Granted they also lack the chaotic genetic roulette of sexual reproduction that the "higher" organisms benefit from, so their average evolution/generation is probably somewhat different than ours.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think they're referring to the section of our DNA which is specific to the Homo genus.
That is, DNA for the Homo genus is probably about 99.5% or more in common, across all species of Homo. You can tell where the Homo DNA starts by comparing it to other members of the subfamily Homininae, and looking for differences.
So, in the Homo-specific portions of our DNA, TFA is claiming that 20% or so is common to modern humans and Neanderthals. That still seems low, given the interbreeding of Neanderthal and Modern Humans, and the fact we both share a direct common ancestor.
For a good long time, anatomically modern humans didn't make cave paintings and jewelry either, at least not often enough to be detected. Nobody knows what triggered the use of art in humans.
The best theory I've heard is it's not that humans became smarter, but rather more social. Neanderthal brains were big if not bigger than ours, so they were potentially pretty smart. However, they may have been relatively anti-social.
The most successful humans were probably those who used trade to get the resources their area lacked. For example, your area may have good arrow-head rocks, but not a lot of prey during the dry season. If you encounter another tribe whose area has a lot of prey but poor rocks, you can trade rocks for meat, and both groups benefit and give birth to more traders instead of making war with neighbors.
Normally mammals battle neighboring groups because they compete with resources, so trade requires a different mentality: socializing with strangers. It may have taken several thousands of years to evolve this tendency. (Slashdotters are still working on it :-)
Neanderthals may just have been slower to take advantage of trade. This is possibly because the human population was greater, magnifying the benefits of trade.
Cave paintings and jewelry may have been an early form of advertising of your goods and services, and serving as social gestures of good will.
Table-ized A.I.
In fact, 20% survive in Arnold Schwarzenegger alone. Add the National Football League, WWE Wrestling, and the Texas State Board of Education, and you've probably got well above 90%.
actually i think it was designed to predict how well someone would do in the military, as the army were the originators of these tests and they used them when recruiting and tasking soldiers.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
We share 40% of our DNA with grass.
Aside from Neanderthals and Denisovians, which we know about, at least one more group of genes in Central Asian peoples comes from an "unknown" hominid for which we have no genetic samples. I'll skip the obvious joke about Homo Erectus.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin