Posted on 06/03/2010 7:32:55 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It was 15 months ago that Science carried a story about the completion of a rough draft of the Neandertal genome. Palaeogeneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was reported as saying "he can't wait to finish crunching the sequence through their computers". It has been quite a long time coming, as it is more than a decade since Paabo first demonstrated it was possible to analyse Neandertal DNA sequences. Earlier reports suggested that Neandertals were sufficiently distinct from humans for them to be classified as a separate species of Homo. The draft genome has more than 3 billion nucleotides collected from three female Neandertals.
"By comparing this composite Neandertal genome with the complete genomes of five living humans from different parts of the world, the researchers found that both Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not. This suggests that early modern humans interbred with Neandertals after moderns left Africa, but before they spread into Asia and Europe. The evidence showing interbreeding is "incontrovertible," says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the work. "There's no other way you can explain this"."
Neanderthals once bred with Homo sapiens. (credit PHOTOLIBRARY, source here)
Genetically, then, Neandertals are not altogether extinct. Paabo is quoted as saying: "They live on in some of us". Therefore, the 'Out-of-Africa' model needs revision, as the migrants interbred to some extent with Neandertals and their genetic signatures spread through the migrant populations. According to Rex Dalton in Nature:
"That revelation is likely to revive the debate about whether or not the two groups are separate species, says anthropologist Fred Smith of Illinois State University in Normal, who has studied Neanderthals in Europe. Smith thinks that they are a subspecies of H. sapiens. Now that the genomes can be compared, it will be possible to investigate the genetic roots of some shared features."
This theme is picked up in the pages of New Scientist, and especially noteworthy is the editorial: "Welcome to the human family, Neanderthals". It calls for Neanderthals to be given a warm reception as truly human relatives.
"Svante Paabo, the pioneer of palaeogenetics, equivocated when a reporter asked whether his genome study suggested Neanderthals are the same species as us: "I would more see them as a form of humans that were a bit more different than people are from each other today, but not that much."
Why so shy? Putting aside the vexing question of what defines a species - which flummoxed even Linnaeus and Darwin - it is hard to see why Neanderthals should now be considered as anything other than Homo sapiens. We know that Neanderthals bred with our ancestors and produced fertile offspring, which is one hallmark of a species. And there is plenty more evidence to support giving them the status of Homo sapiens neanderthalis. Neanderthals shared a common ancestor with modern humans around 500,000 years ago. Its descendants went their separate ways as the Neanderthals adapted to colder climes, but then, at least 50,000 years ago, they resumed relations in the eastern Mediterranean, where the two populations met again. This pattern wouldn't necessarily merit separate species status for most animals, so why for us and Neanderthals?"
There is undoubtedly some journalistic enthusiasm here, because the claimed "hallmark of a species" is not valid: hybridisation is not that unusual between species and sometimes it occurs between genera (within the same family). This in itself is not a decisive argument. However, when we combine genetics, morphology and behaviour, the picture looks much clearer.
"There is, of course, more to the concept of being human than ecology and genetics: we are human because we think, talk, love and believe. It is impossible to know the mental life of a Neanderthal, but there is reason to think that it was not so different from our own. The Neanderthal genome differed little from ours, encoding fewer than 100 changes that would affect the shape of proteins. True, some of these differences occur in genes linked to brain function, but similar variation is found among humans today. Moreover, Neanderthals share with us a version of a gene linked to the evolution of speech, and recent archaeological evidence suggests that their minds were capable of the symbolic representations that underlie language and art. If that's not human, then what is?"
This brings us to why Neandertals have been so misinterpreted over the years. Why has it taken us so long to reject the picture of a brutish, grunting caveman devoid of aesthetics and reason? The Editorial starts with these words: "WE HUMANS like to see ourselves as special, at the very pinnacle of all life. That makes us keen to keep a safe distance between ourselves and related species that threaten our sense of uniqueness. Unfortunately, the evidence can sometimes make that difficult." Is this interpretation valid? Do we like to keep a safe distance between ourselves and anything that threatens our uniqueness? Perhaps we should reflect on on the history of scientific racialism, that portrayed races as occupying different rungs of the evolutionary ladder - was this also to keep a safe distance from races that threatened our uniqueness? Furthermore, is it true that we, the population at large, like to keep this safe distance? Why is it that any reports of animals showing apparent cognitive and creative skills are deemed newsworthy, whereas other studies showing a big divide between humans and animals languish in obscurity? I leave these questions for further thought and reflection.
One thing I have noticed over the years is that people with a design perspective have been far more receptive to the idea that Neandertals were part of the human family. They have been impressed by morphological considerations, but the cultural artifacts of Neandertals have made a big impression. In the early days, these were relatively meager, but more recent years have seen a flowering of reports of Neandertal culture. In this blog, these issues have been explored on several occasions: Burying the view that Neanderthals were half-wits, Darwinist thinking on the origin of religion, The cognitive skills of Stone Age Man, Images of evolution as secular icons, Walks like a man, talks like a man - is it a man?, and Rethinking Neanderthals. There is a pattern here, and it is evident even in the original reception given to Neandertal finds. The Darwinian scientists were looking for intermediates and they found one in Neandertal Man. He was portrayed as an ape-man and used to prop up an evolutionary story of ape-to-man evolution. After it was realised that the original finds were bones from someone deformed by disease, the story did not change much. The icon was too important to lose. Darwinism had created a blind spot for palaeoanthropologists and impaired the progress of science. Those able to make design inferences within science have been ahead of the game, but now the genetic data is published, all have to follow. However, would you believe, the same issue of New Scientist that carried the editorial noted above also had an article with the title: "Neanderthals not the only apes humans bred with". Apes? Really! Outdated traditions do not die when it comes to Darwinism - they just get repackaged!
A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome
Richard E. Green [et al] and Svante Paabo
Science, 328, 7 May 2010: 710-722 | DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021
Abstract: Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals. Comparisons of the Neandertal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.
See also:
Dalton, R., Ancient DNA set to rewrite human history, Nature, 465, 148-149, (12 May 2010) | doi:10.1038/465148a
Editorial, Welcome to the human family, Neanderthals, (New Scientist, 12 May 2010)
Gibbons, A., Close Encounters of the Prehistoric Kind, Science 328, 7 May 2010: 680-684.
I prefer to check the barcodes myself, and so far it looks like the Neanderthals have the right kind of barcodes to be considered Europeans!
Both the mitochondrial and nucleic DNA evidence agree that they are clearly not human, not nestled into that chart somewhere.
The chart is based on genetic analysis, it is not wrong in representing what it is, a measure of genetic distance.
It agrees with other studies on DNA genetic distance between human populations and that distance will hold true independent of what neutral DNA markers are used.
The effort for some 200 years is to find the stepping stones from a piece of ape to us. Very smart people want to believe they came from monkeys. I would rather believe we came from dirt or from a space man than to believe it was an ape.
Where is the DNA results? It is the same vault as Obama’s birth certificate. Lost forever.
However, the Sumarians have dynasties dating back 350,000 years ago. So, 400,000 years ago, very intelligent People were on the earth. Oops!
This cannot be true, We came from stupid apes that ate a balance diet and did not smoke. Thus, we now have humans who smoke, drink and mess around. I can see the connection.
They may find that some of our people begat the Neanderthals and they are really “throwbacks”, the ones civilization sends away less they pollute the population.
Can’t have that. We cannot have a population that is too stupid to be in th UN.
Or can we?
Enough already.
Paul
ROFLMAO! Great picture...needed the laugh!
Looks like Mel Brooks doing his "2000 Year Old Man" bit
GGG ping?
Actually, according to the article, she and other Africans would be among the people who do not have any Neanderthal genes in them. The mixing occurred among those who left Africa.
This does not rule out her relationship to Sasquatch, however.
Red hair, you say?
Do you have a reference for that? I've never heard such a claim. Thanks.
If neanderthals are not human, what are they?
"By comparing this composite Neandertal genome with the complete genomes of five living humans from different parts of the world, the researchers found that both Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not.This suggests that early modern humans interbred with Neandertals after moderns left Africa, but before they spread into Asia and Europe.
The evidence showing interbreeding is "incontrovertible," says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the work. "There's no other way you can explain this."
This suggestion that humans and Neanderthals "share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA," is necessarily false, and one has to wonder if it's not just someone's political agenda masquerading as science.
Humans and Neanderthals do not share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA. We share about 99.9% with Neanderthals, the same as shared amongst other humans.
The nuclear DNA differences between humans and Neanderthals is not 1% or 4%, it's one-tenth of one percent. In terms of actual numbers, 3 million "base pairs" out of 3 billion total are different. And that's the same number as differences amongst various modern humans.
If there are some identical DNA base pairs shared by Neanderthals, Europeans and Asians, but not Africans, that number must be much smaller than one-tenth of one percent.
None of which is intended to deny that our horny-goat ancestors were just as likely to hanky-pank indiscriminately as we are. It's just that the results were not as significant as those 1% to 4% numbers suggest.
Why is everything about Teh Ghey?
A wolf and a coyote may be some 97% or so identical to a wolf in genetic DNA, but that doesn't mean that one cannot find genetic evidence of wolf ancestry within some coyote populations by way of crossbreeding, and be able to estimate that coyote population as having 1 to 4% wolf ancestry.
Similarly, a human and a neanderthal may be some 99% or so identical in genetic DNA, that doesn't mean that one cannot find genetic evidence of neanderthal ancestry within some human populations by way of crossbreeding, and be able to estimate that human population as having 1 to 4% neanderthal ancestry.
Neanderthals are distinctly non human.
The amount of difference you would expect to see in neutral genetic markers between human populations is AT MOST one third of what you would see when comparing a human population and the NON human neanderthal.
The evidence suggests that while the most distantly related humans shared a common ancestor within the last 100,000 years, humans and neanderthals were different populations some 250,000 years ago.
In morphology and DNA, neanderthals are distinctly not human.
They were most certainly not from a “normal” population of European humans that had rickets and were put in the Stone Age equivalent of a leper colony.
I think they are presuming the rest of the genome is pretty much identical.
Wait until they get into epigenetics ~ that's where you'll find the Neanderthal materials all over the place. After all, a mere 20,000 years of contact with life in the midst of an Ice Age is really not enough to elicit the sort of cold climate adaptations modern Northern hemispheric humans exhibit. On the other hand, a full 400,000 years of such contact, as Neanderthals, ought to explain it all quite readily.
Neanderthals are distinctly non human."
Your explanation here may well be correct, but that's not what the report says. And this is not the only place I've seen those numbers.
The report says:
"the researchers found that both Europeans and Asians share 1% to 4% of their nuclear DNA with Neandertals. But Africans do not."
That is clearly bogus, and someone needs to send whoever wrote it back to remedial math class -- or maybe "scientific ethics" class.
Useing the coyote-wolf example again, it would be like if you identified 100 uniquely wolf genetic markers, and some coyote populations had none of them, but other coyote populations had 1 to 4% of them. That would indicated that the second coyote population had 1 to 4% wolf ancestry.
The same techniques could be used to estimate the amount of “Moor” ancestry in your average Sicilian, or the amount of Amerindian ancestry in your average American of European descent.
“If one were to read Young Earth sites like Answers In Genesis and Institute for Creation Research, one would learn that have been saying for decades that Neanderthals were normal human beings with Rickets disease and existed as separate colonies from humans, much like leper colonies.”
—If the standard Neanderthal physique is from rickets, than I need to stop drinking milk.
One of the most easily identifiable differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens is how incredibly massive their bones are and how powerfully built they are. The very opposite of rickets. The vast majority of the Neanderthal diet was meat; in other words they hunted for almost all their food, a lifestyle next to impossible for people with rickets.
It’s a rather odd idea to have people who have a disease that’s completely non-contagious, and makes it very difficult to walk, travel hundreds or thousands of miles north – to a land with relatively little sunlight. Of course, lack of sunlight is a main cause of rickets. It would be like sending people suffering from scurvy to the Island of No Fruit, when all they need to get better is to eat an orange.
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