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Oldest Human Genome Reveals When Our Ancestors Mixed With Neanderthals
sciencehabit writes DNA recovered from a femur bone in Siberia belongs to a man who lived 45,000 years ago, according to a new study. His DNA was so well preserved that scientists were able to sequence his entire genome, making his the oldest complete modern human genome on record. Like present-day Europeans and Asians, the man has about 2% Neanderthal DNA. But his Neanderthal genes are clumped together in long strings, as opposed to chopped up into fragments, indicating that he lived not long after the two groups swapped genetic material. The man likely lived 7000 to 13,000 years after modern humans and Neanderthals mated, dating the mixing to 52,000 to 58,000 years ago, the researchers conclude. That's a much smaller window than the previous best estimate of 37,000 to 86,000 years ago.
Does not conclusively prove. Mixing could have occurred at many times and locations. While useful, more data needed.
Silence is a state of mime.
The author's cro-mag bias is showing.
Her title implies that the neandertals in question are not also our ancestors.
A better title might have been "...genome reveals when our Cro-Magnon ancestors had sex with our Neandertal ancestors."
Mod parent up. The article as written is dumbed down and misleading in many ways. Against my usual temperament I'm going to make a sociological/anthropological argument that someone reading the article will draw very wrong conclusions about the nature of prehistoric Neanderthal-modern human interaction. Genetic inheritance or progeny happens to be the only evidence we have right now about early Neanderthal-modern human interaction. But it does not say anything useful about when we "first had sex with" them as the article claims. Consider the following: Archaeological evidence suggests that large scale violence we would consider warfare was a part of human life as far as 7,500 or possibly 14,000 years ago. Does that mean ancient society was all about peace and love before that time? No. There is too little information to make such sweeping conclusions. To return to the subject at hand, not all sexual encounters with Neanderthals are going to leave evidence for us to conveniently find. What we *DO* know at this point is that at least one such encounter resulted in a pregnancy that was carried to term and the resulting offspring lived long enough to have children of his/her own who continued to survive. That's ALL we know. Put another way, imagine the young men and women of ancient communities playing a game of "fuck, marry, or kill" that included their funny looking neighbors. The visual may not be pleasant, but any earlier incidents of war-rape and deliberate infanticide due to parental rejection will leave little to no evidence behind for us. And barring extreme luck, there is almost NO WAY we can know if/when such incidents occurred. Who really knows when Neanderthals and us *FIRST* had sex?
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My guess is that the fact that no organisms exist with a Neanderthal genome defines them as extinct. Where one draws the line is more art than science I guess ... I know that there are some genetics in us (like the HMG group of proteins) that are ancient, but work so well that we still retain them. That doesn't mean the first species to have evolved them isn't extinct, it just means we evolved from them.
Well, I don't think that quite matches the scientific concept of "species". By your definition, almost all species who were alive 50,000 years ago would be considered extinct, but hardly any biologists would agree with that. It's true that no humans alive today have 100% Neanderthal genes, but it's also nearly certain that there are no living humans with 100% Cro-Magnon genes, either. What happened would be considered a mixing of several human sub-species after migrations of one or more African groups into Eurasia. The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing. This sort of thing happens in species all the time, when conditions allow such genetic mixing, and the result is rarely considered a new species.
The fact is that modern humans are all one species. We can and do interbreed when groups mingle, and there are no groups of modern humans that are genetically incompatible. If sub-species "disappear" by genetic mixing, that is usually not called an extinction event. It's just the routine and normal mingling of subspecies.
An interesting contrast is that most North American duck species are known to hybridize occasionally, and the offspring are usually fertile. Does this mean they're really all one species? No, because they all mingle a lot, but interbreeding is rare. They have "behavioral" species-separation features, mostly based on female mate choice. The females are mostly all mottled brown (protective coloring), and the males often approach females of other species (because they can't tell them apart either ;-). But the females usually only accept males that have the "right" color markings; the others are ugly to them. This suffices to keep the species separate, though there is probably a very low level of genetic interchange between many of the species.
But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We've got to stop with the Neanderthal nonsense...
Neanderthals are *not* the magical missing link, nor does proving/disproving the existence of God or the truth of the theory of Evolution...none of this is in play
This is about legacy academia and how century-old academia wars are burdening good research today.
Another example: Clovis Culture http://www.examiner.com/articl...
Clovis Culture theory has been the bane of anthropologists and archaeologists for decades...the only reason it was so entrenched is b/c of flaws in academia.
Neanderthals are the same. The whole notion of "Neanderthals" being a separate thing is just a miscategorization of traits that modern humans have. Maybe they are rare, and have become less attractive over the millenia, but not any different than any other trait.
Look at Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev
The traits we collectively call "Neanderthal" are a distinction without a difference.
It's a failure of science that some ideas are irrationally difficult to disprove. Usually it is because people are using the research wrongly to prove a non-science point.
Again...Neanderthals can be variations on modern humans and it **does not disprove evolution!!!**
Thank you Dave Raggett
Strangely enough, beer was invented 57,999 years ago.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes