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.
My wife says shes down with a threesome with a Neanderthal lady.
Go science!
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
Sounds as though it was the first cross-species orgy, which no doubt started that disgusting trend which lives on even today.
The Admin and the Engineer
The same tests on DNA from another man from the same era and locale but from a different Y-haplogroup (and different mt-haplogroup) might show a completely different proportion of genetic mixing and time to most recent mating. Don't draw too many conclusions from a sample of just one.
This can't be right. The world is only 2014 years old!
So by what metric are Neanderthals extinct, if there are Neanderthals who have living descendants with a measurable amount of their genetic makeup?
(Or, for that matter, dinosaurs.)
Humanity always fall for the trailer trash around the corner.
Does not conclusively prove. Mixing could have occurred at many times and locations. While useful, more data needed.
Silence is a state of mime.
L O L
Tralalalal before you delete it it will have read by billions lol.
Is Satan ever busy today? Can't I go 5 minutes without him testing my Faith?
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."
How accurate is it for the media to say a "complete" genome was sequenced? I know a little molecular biology and have been lead to believe that certain types of DNA, (centromeres, telomeres, other such regions with lots of repetitive sequences or "fragile sites") are very hard to sequence reliably. Are these "swept under the rug" in a "complete" sequence? Perhaps a related question, how are non-coding regulatory portions of chromosomes handled in whole genome analysis?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
What you said. Also, I have read that there are lots of bits of Neanderthal DNA in current humans. Maybe as much as 40%, but different small parts of this in different modern lineages.
House homonid...Street homonid...ghetto homonid...we're all homonids.
Neanderthals were smart enough not to have sex with niggers.
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/
The summary refers to the time when neanderthals and modern humans intermixed, but can we really call what came before the mixing modern humans? It seems that something about the combination sparked huge evolutionary changes that allowed us to rather rapidly (evolutionarily speaking) develop modern society. As far as I'm concerned, the history of modern humans starts with the mixing.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
The PC police would like to point out that not all current races/nationalities have had as much or in some cases any distinct mixing. So those without are just as 'modern'.
being interoperable with posix doesn't stop openbsd from becoming extinct, but in every of today's UNIXes (except older unixes of course) there is a tiny part of openbsd, but that isn't harmful.
its nice to combine human genetics and netcraft.
I think that some of those Africans look a little bit more Homo Sapien than Europeans who have the Neanderthal Genes.
A little bit more upright, less stooped, a little bit less hairy, a little mound of forebrain in their foreheads.
There's a lot of genetic variation in Africa by comparison though. I'm thinking of those tall, really black-skinned, Sudanese looking people.
Ancient news
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
If humans and neanderthals came and were able to mate then obviously they previously split from the same species.
The only way to find out for sure if one of his parents was Neanderthal is to clone him. I bet the government's already working on it.
Neanderthals make up a very small percentage of our genes 2%, there are other ways we can get new genes other than from breeding, virus can introduce new genes into species but we wouldn't call virus that have done so for use our ancestors, this not really the same of cause, the point is nature is messy with not clear cut borders. Neanderthals represent a little be of added genetic variability to our species, if you want to say 2% is enough to count as our ancestor then thats perfectly valid there is no one Cro-Magnon ancestor that is any more our ancestor than any one Neanderthal ancestor.
I can tell the same by looking at some of my neighbors
We've got to stop with the Neanderthal nonsense...
Right we do. There are just a few pieces of evidence now, but it may be that Neanderthal is actually a distant race that falls within our human specie. If their whole genome diverged from the branch of modern humans ~600,000YA and yet --- if there is additional evidence of interbreeding up to ~50,000YA, and humans from ~50,000YA could interbreed with us today (which I believe is true) --- then I consider it extremely likely that a Neanderthal could breed with a modern human.
And give your children superpowers like X-ray vision.
This is vindication for Jean Auel, whose Earth's Children series of books has popularized this exciting idea for generations of children. As a lay author she has been the lightning-rod target of those who disagree with the hypothesis, and at times her literary critics have even betrayed a tone of indulgent arrogance that just might have been a glimmer of the old Darwinian stuffed shirts, who banished Neanderthal from the human family early on by some of the characteristics that (merely) differentiate races existing today. Central to all of this goofy criticism is the Ayla's hybrid child Durc.
I highly recommend Earth's Children books to all. They are on par with Tolkien in their use of descriptive language, the central characters portray a series of actual humans over time who have made technological discoveries over time. The books are especially fit for children as they imagine the rich and viable human society that we know must have existed long ago, dispelling the silly myths that what we would recognize as civilization is merely a few thousand years old.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Jean Auel's work is literate smut. It's just a Stone Age bodice-ripper. Don't make me quote-mine for proof.
When they were young, drunk, and needed the money.
Judging by one of my coworkers I'd say it was still going on around sixty years ago.
I checked it out...seems interesting
I kind of wish we could just ditch "neanderthal" and "cro-magnon" from the lexicon entirely...Cro-Mags are "AMH" and IMHO all the evidence shows that Neanderthals are AMH as well...so let's start from scratch with the genomic comparisons and make a new nomenclature
Back to Earth's Children....from reading the wikipedia, it seems like it might be similar to the film "Clan of the Cave Bear"
Thank you Dave Raggett
You mean "cylon", right? Ancient humans mixed with cylons.
That's the first book in the series.
It was made into a film 6 years after the original book, after she had written the second and third books.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This is getting soap operaish.
This much older modern human has the same fraction of Neanderthal DNA as modern humans today.
Think about it.
We haven't seen any ancient Modern Humans that have a different degree of Neanderthal ancestry.
When Modern Humans first bred with Neanderthals the offspring were 50/50. If these F1s bred with each other predominantly from then on you would end up with a new breeding population that was roughly 50/50 in heritage. If the F1s predominantly bred with Modern Humans, then the Neanderthan portion would be cut to 25% in the F2, and if the process repeats it is 12.5% in the F3, etc.
This process stops when there are effectively no more pure blood Modern Humans, that the Neanderthal genome has diffused evenly across the entire population. But subsequent re-encounters would inject new Neanderthal DNA and restart the process.
We haven't yet seen any evidence of this history yet. Even 45,000 years ago it was "ancient history" and epoch that passed many, many generations earlier.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Show this to the fucking retards who go "WELL WHERE ARE ALL THE NEANDERTHALS!?"
Learn 2 science.
Strangely enough, beer was invented 57,999 years ago.
To be accurate, beer was invented 58,001 years ago.
whoa!
mind=blown
Thank you Dave Raggett
Now you say 45,000 years ago baloney! But I guess you believe in that humble jumble theory from stupid Darwinism which is a lie since they stopped teaching where we came from God! Not a picking ape or a monkey!
The latest big finding on Neanderthals: Some 20% of caveman DNA made its way into the human genome thanks to mating between humans and Neanderthals, though people today typically have only 1% or 2% of the stuff. (People have different parts of the DNA, which collectively represent what's left of the Neanderthal genome.) The results come compliments of two studies. Standout details: In one study of 1,004 people, Harvard researchers wanted to determine which populations have the most Neanderthal DNA; East Asians ranked ahead of Europeans, at 1.4% versus 1.1%, respectively, Reuters reports. (Africans essentially have no Neanderthal DNA, as Neanderthals never lived there.) That backs up a 2013 study, notes Reuters, but the researchers went beyond previous findings with this observation: Though Neanderthals are thought to have died out on the Iberian peninsula 28,000 years ago, Spaniards exhibited some of the smallest amounts of Neanderthal DNA, at 1.07%. As such, Neanderthals "are not fully extinct, if you will," a co-author of the Harvard study tells the Los Angeles Times. "They live on in some of us today—a little bit." The second study also compared the genomes of Europeans (379 of them) and East Asians (286), and found a similar heavier "genetic signature of Neanderthals" among the latter. A co-author tells the LAT that might indicate a second series of matings happened. "It's a two-night-stand theory now." The University of Washington geneticist also shared this observation: Based on the amount of our genome that comes from Neanderthals, he thinks the two species "mated perhaps 300 times about 50,000 years ago," per the LAT, though it's unclear whether that happened in one wave or over generations. Both studies reached a shared conclusion: that natural selection smiled on the Neanderthal genes that make skin and hair tough (possibly providing thicker insulation), and they remain common in populations with Neanderthal genes today, the New York Times reports.