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Neandertal genes found in all non-African populations

dropzone said:
The rule of thumb I've used since Neanderthals were supposedly UNrelated, some 20 years ago:

Humans will, er, mate with anybody remotely human. And others further away. That brutish brow ridge could be hot to a Hss female. And a younger Hsn female could do it for a Hss guy, with beer in his belly and sea shells in his pouch.
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And sometimes neither in the same genus, and i get the feeling not even always "alive" at the time of the mating.
 
Here's an example of that first.
http://rense.com/general/baaaah.htm
Ray "conceded" the sexual assault, but his attorney added that she didn't believe his actions fell within the state's definition of animal cruelty, which specifies intending to maim, mutilate, torture, wound or kill.

"His intent was to complete a sexual act with the sheep rather than harm or kill the sheep," Kirkwood said.
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Right.

Anyway, thanks to scientific investigation, we know non-Africans can carry genetic inheritance from the Neanderthals.
Amazing what the genome mapping has allowed us to learn!

This is fantastic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project

The researchers recovered ancient DNA of Neanderthals by extracting the DNA from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave, Croatia, and other bones found in Spain, Russia, and Germany
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randman said:
I am aware the term species is imprecise and fuzzy. It's ironic coming from you to admit that and yet you still use the term, considering how you have gone on and on about precision in taxonomic classification and other terms.

The reality is there is no reason to still call them a separate species by any definition of the word. It's just a holdover from the time when evos tried to pass them off as more ape-like in search of the missing link.
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I am aware the term Creator is imprecise and fuzzy. It's ironic you still use it.
 
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A little context: Svante Paabo's group at Kaiser-Wilhelm Gneetic in Leipzig first published (in 2006, I think) a paper which stated that there was no connections between sapiens and Neandertal to be seen in mtDNA. In May 2010, the same team published the paper that Skeptic Ginger cites (http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7381636&postcount=5) on the first crack at a complete DNA genome for Neandertal, and added in a little analysis that showed a 1-4% Neandertal influence in nuclear DNA on the basis of a comparison of the Neandertal DNA against five subjects drawn from diverse cultures. The other paper cited (post #4) is from 1/2011 and confirms Paabo's conjecture, apparently raising the ante to up to 9% in some cases, and verifying that all strands that left Africa are so affected. In the article cited in #6 apparently references another paper that is looking into the implications.

Good stuff. I was wondering how long it would take to see some more science coming out of the Neandertal genome.
 
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pakeha said:
On the subject of our kissing cousins
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/27/neanderthals-cooked-diet-us-research

Amazing that plaque and foodstuffs would have survived so long, isn't?
And it's new to me the Neanderthals cooked.
So much to learn.
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What is even more amazing is that they ate any vegetable matter whatsoever. It has been thought for some time that they lived exclusively on a meat diet, which has been used as a hypothesis about why they died out. But it included cooked meat. Cooking was thought to have been co-invented along with reliable fire-making, back into H erectus, maybe habilis times.
 
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JoeTheJuggler said:
I think the mixing that actually happened was not very significant. Also, I think the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals are pretty striking. Still--subspecies is fine by me if you worry that a species is defined as all the organisms capable of producing fertile offspring. (In plant taxonomy, that'd make you a lumper rather than a splitter!)
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Well, I'd have to say it is significant to the extent that it altered H sapiens from whatever they were before the meeting to us, and on the other side, some of the descendents of H neandertalensis are still alive in us. Certainly not a huge amount, but enough that it cannot be said that they are totally extinct without issue. They gained life's immortality from it, as much as any species ever does.
 
shadron said:
What is even more amazing is that they ate any vegetable matter whatsoever. It has been thought for some time that they lived exclusively on a meat diet, which has been used as a hypothesis about why they died out. But it included cooked meat. Cooking was thought to have been co-invented along with reliable fire-making, back into H erectus, maybe habilis times.
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Yes, on a recent episode of Nova or Nature about H erectus I recall a scientist discussed a correlation between the size of teeth(which shrank when "we" stopped eating raw meat)and the evolving digestive tract (which also changed as "we" began eating cooked meat) that follows the development of the region of the brain used in language.

These correlations suggest that learning to use fire and cooking meat was a plausible scenario and factor for human ancestors as early as habilis or erectus to gather together in close proximity for prolonged time periods, like say, an evening's time leading to sunrise. One can imagine then language and some elements of rudimentary society emerging in this time of coerced close proximity.
 
randman said:
But basically they were a tribe of people that mated with the tribes that became more dominant and the DNA shows that.

How is that effectively not make Neanderthals the same species as human beings?
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The same reason zebras aren't the same species as wild horses.
 
In layman's terms they were just people like anyone else.
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I, for one, am NOT a layman, and therefore have no interest in what their terms are. The reason we keep the binomial species names is that the laymen's terms cause an enormous amount of confusion.

Something surprising to me is that all human lines who left Africa seem to include Neanderthal DNA. I'd always assumed multiple tribes left Africa at different times and potentially in diferent ways--without any firm evidence one way or another, it seemed reasonable (and avoided the whole racisim thing, which is a bias but one I'm okay with). Seems that we now have evidence either of a single out-of-Africa migration, or of extensive intermixing once the tribes left Africa ("extensive" meaning enough to homogenize at least this portion of the genome).
 
shadron said:
A little context: Svante Paabo's group at Kaiser-Wilhelm Gneetic in Leipzig first published (in 2006, I think) a paper which stated that there was no connections between sapiens and Neandertal to be seen in mtDNA. In May 2010, the same team published the paper that Skeptic Ginger cites (http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7381636&postcount=5) on the first crack at a complete DNA genome for Neandertal, and added in a little analysis that showed a 1-4% Neandertal influence in nuclear DNA on the basis of a comparison of the Neandertal DNA against five subjects drawn from diverse cultures. The other paper cited (post #4) is from 1/2011 and confirms Paabo's conjecture, apparently raising the ante to up to 9% in some cases, and verifying that all strands that left Africa are so affected. In the article cited in #6 apparently references another paper that is looking into the implications.

Good stuff. I was wondering how long it would take to see some more science coming out of the Neandertal genome.
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This was my impression of the state of the research. For quite a while all the studies were saying no common DNA, and now they're showing just a bit. That means there was some hybridizing, but not much.
 
randman said:
The reality is there is no reason to still call them a separate species by any definition of the word. It's just a holdover from the time when evos tried to pass them off as more ape-like in search of the missing link.
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And now we see you ignorance of modern anthropology. Neanderthals are certainly very closely related to the ancestors of modern humans, but there has long been a debate among anthropologists regarding just how closely related the two groups are. You act as if this will invalidated evolutionary biology, but the fact is that there are many evolutionary biologist who considered such a discovery to be highly probable. This is an interesting discovery (still pending further peer review), but there is nothing shocking about it, and certainly nothing that calls into question modern evolutionary theory.
 
randman said:
I am aware the term species is imprecise and fuzzy. It's ironic coming from you to admit that and yet you still use the term, considering how you have gone on and on about precision in taxonomic classification and other terms.

The reality is there is no reason to still call them a separate species by any definition of the word. It's just a holdover from the time when evos tried to pass them off as more ape-like in search of the missing link.
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I'm not so sure. The word species, as with all words, is used conventionally. There is no inherent "species-ness" in the universe. It's just the way we understand things. If you want to look closely enough, you could should a continuous lineage of all animals ever to have lived, so you'd consider there to be really only one species of animal.

Ever hear of a "ring species"? Population A has geneflow only with Population B which has geneflow only with A and Population C, which has geneflow only with Population B and D. But A and D cannot interbreed with fertile offspring.

So yeah, the idea of species is not so clear cut as you seem to think. At some point, it's just a matter of convention.

I'd sooner argue that by a more reasonable taxonomy, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans should be in the same genus...if you like to lump rather than split.
 
Dinwar said:
I, for one, am NOT a layman, and therefore have no interest in what their terms are. The reason we keep the binomial species names is that the laymen's terms cause an enormous amount of confusion.

Something surprising to me is that all human lines who left Africa seem to include Neanderthal DNA. I'd always assumed multiple tribes left Africa at different times and potentially in diferent ways--without any firm evidence one way or another, it seemed reasonable (and avoided the whole racisim thing, which is a bias but one I'm okay with). Seems that we now have evidence either of a single out-of-Africa migration, or of extensive intermixing once the tribes left Africa ("extensive" meaning enough to homogenize at least this portion of the genome).
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In the BBC documentary the Incredible Human Journey, they discuss there were really 2 pushes out of Africa made by humans. The first group made it to the middle east I believe through a number of generations, but died out completely with no trace of them left genetically.

The second group was perhaps as small as a few hundred people or as large as one thousand or so, and this one initial original group was the only group that made it out successfully, and you can find their markers in all non African people on Earth apparently according to the documentary.

The idea that one group migrated out and led to populating Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas seems like the stuff of legend to me, or a fantasy/scifi story.

I've heard conflicting information, but this documentary was relatively recent.
You can see it all on Youtube I believe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYe7FJHU2eo
 
shadron said:
What is even more amazing is that they ate any vegetable matter whatsoever. It has been thought for some time that they lived exclusively on a meat diet, which has been used as a hypothesis about why they died out. But it included cooked meat. Cooking was thought to have been co-invented along with reliable fire-making, back into H erectus, maybe habilis times.
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So now there's the question- who invented fire?

Foster Zygote said:
Yes, it would. It supports the case made by anthropologists who argue for the taxonomy "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis".
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Do the genome maps support this?

Dinwar said:
I, for one, am NOT a layman, and therefore have no interest in what their terms are. The reason we keep the binomial species names is that the laymen's terms cause an enormous amount of confusion.

Something surprising to me is that all human lines who left Africa seem to include Neanderthal DNA. I'd always assumed multiple tribes left Africa at different times and potentially in diferent ways--without any firm evidence one way or another, it seemed reasonable (and avoided the whole racisim thing, which is a bias but one I'm okay with). Seems that we now have evidence either of a single out-of-Africa migration, or of extensive intermixing once the tribes left Africa ("extensive" meaning enough to homogenize at least this portion of the genome).
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I'd asssumed the out-of-Africa migrations passed through Spain and the mingling of the two genomes occured there. Off to read more.
edited- I see I'm wrong on the Spanish route.
 
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The idea that one group migrated out and led to populating Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas seems like the stuff of legend to me, or a fantasy/scifi story.
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Definitely. We're talking a group about the size of the field battles at Pensic (and much less well-armed) taking on the entire globe. Screw floods and such--we need myths about that! Mostly because I seriously doubt anything we wrote would come close to what they actually did.

This is the reason I love science--it's stranger, and vastly more wonderful, than fiction.
 
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