Posted on 10/26/2009 3:33:00 PM PDT by Dysart
Modern man and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to leading geneticist Professor Svante Paabo.
Professor Paabo, who is director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the claim at a conference in the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York.
But Prof Paabo said he was unclear if the couplings had led to children, of if they were capable of producing offspring.
"What I'm really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?" he said in an article in The Sunday Times.
"I'm sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite vigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence."
The phenomenon is already seen in modern animals such as horses and zebras, and lions and tigers, but resulting offspring have always been infertile.
In recent years, fossils with both Neanderthal and modern human features have been found suggesting the two species interbred but previous scans of Neanderthal genes reveal Neanderthal DNA to have a very different make-up to modern man's.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Who cares?! LOL!
Hey... almost any Navy bar, almost any night...
There is also a well known ‘Red Wolf’ in the southwestern U.S. - a cross between Wolf and Coyote... the offspring are known to reproduce in the wild.
Amazing how much ‘common knowledge’ is absolute bunk. Journo takes it as axiomatic that such mixes cannot reproduce, and many think species are defined by what can and cannot interbreed.
Columbus also didn't ‘discover’ the world was round, it was common knowledge and the argument was not over the shape of the Earth but how far it was around (the figure of Eratosthenes was accurate, Columbus's figure made the journey optimistically shorter).
Okay ... I’m glad you agree with me...
Just thought I would through out a different example of just how pervasive and pernicious these little ‘facts’ that are not are.
Since the Endangered Species Act, it is politically advantageous to treat every mutation of a species too common to qualify as if the mutation is the same as a whole new species, or if it is too slight in differences, as a subspecies, so that it can be defined as ‘endangered’ and grants may be procured to study and preserve it. In some cases such as the Florida panther it isn’t even unique enough to be considered a mutation so geographic isolation makes it a political ‘species-of-convenience’ so important to some organizations’ wallets and political agendas that they would sooner see it destroyed by inbreeding than admit that it is in fact nothing more than a common cougar by allowing the remaining population to be saved by increasing its genepool. There is more genetic variation between the chihuahua and the great dane than there is between a barred owl and a spotted owl, or between a yellow shafted flicker and a red shafted flicker, but with the dog breeds there isn’t the political “necessity.”
It's much more likely "it" would hit you first. And there's a very good chance she'd be anthropophagus.
My husband, who grew up in farming area of the Middle West was once crossing a pasture and spied one of his classmates doing a goat. The guy said, “if you ever tell on me, I’ll kill you.” Well, he told me, but we were living five states away by that time, so nobody got killed ;-)
If they did have sex and the off spring were like mules and couldn't reproduce this could, in part, account for the extinction of the Neanderthal, however there would be no way of proving this because the DNA would have been lost.
with clothes or without clothes?
With Bill Clinton you have to aSK!
Yes he’s drawing a conclusion with a complete lack of evidence. There are no hybrid fossils either. All the suspected hybrid fossils have turned out to be modern humans.
All Scots are suspect because of the prevalence of red hair, a known Neanderthal genetic trait.
Ah yes. I, too, remember college.
“This is conclusive proof that primitive man had beer.”
I presume your comment means that all the Scots girls got better looking at closing time.
You know, you can build a fortune,
establish an empire,
conquer great lands,
but if you sleep with ONE NEADERTHAL,
you’ll always be remembered as . . .
LEftists lack physical courage.
For that man’s fault, I doubt he lacks courage.
Cool, as opposed to Ortho docs.
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