Posted on 01/29/2015 1:26:30 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The discovery of a 55,000-year-old partial skull of a modern human in an Israeli cave, the first sighting of Homo sapiens in this time and place, offers skeletal evidence to support the idea that Neandertals and moderns mated in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. What's more, the skull could belong to an ancestor of the modern humans who later swept across Europe and Asia and replaced the Neandertals.
The find supports a raft of recent genetic studies. A 2010 analysis, for example, found that up to 2% of the genomes of today's Europeans and Asians consist of Neandertal DNA, a clear sign of at least limited interbreeding in the past. Two years later, scientists compared ancient DNA extracted from Neandertal fossils to that of contemporary modern human populations around the world, concluding that this interbreeding took place in the Middle East, most likely between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago. And last year, a 45,000-year-old modern human found in Siberia, the oldest modern to have its genome sequenced, was revealed to have harbored a little more than 2% Neandertal DNA, allowing researchers to refine the interbreeding event to roughly 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
From the Neandertal side, this time and place make sense. That's because numerous skeletons dated to that time period have been found in caves in Israel and other parts of the Middle East over the years, and Neandertals were still living in the region as late as 49,000 years ago. Yet the other side of this mating partnership has been conspicuously absent from the fossil record of the Middle East: Although modern humans from Africa appear to have ventured into some of these same caves as early as 120,000 years ago, none have been found after about 80,000 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
Better than some of the ghetto rats we see.
You got that right!
I’m of Irish and German ancestry, so this subject is of interest to me. I’d love to be related to the Neanderthals. It would explain my German Grandfather’s colouring. :)
OK, I'll go with that. Sounds better!!!!
:-)
Us proud Neanderthal descendants want our H back.
Us proud Neanderthal descendants want our H back.
Neandertals were smart enough to disguise themselves as goats?
Well they say modern humans came out of Africa...compared to the majority of white women I have noticed otherwise normal-looking black men paired with, I’d say she’s a looker!
On one hand you don't know. On the other you do know. Wow.
Oh, go away! As if this kind of stuff was new to Free Republic.
IOW, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I did not find the post by IOW but most of these stories do seem credible after frauds like Nebraska Man, Peking Man, Java Man and the like. I think Neanderthal mating with modern man is a fantastic. These writers say a lot of things I think to sell their papers or to get grant monies but there is no hard evidence nor peer review.
Just the facts mam like Sargent Friday used to say.
I was think the same things the first Muslims...
They aren’t? What happens if she brought to the mom ‘Good Cavekeeping’ magazine.
True...
Well, if Laz would hit Lena Dunham, he’d probably hit that... twice.
I think I know her!
Or the first...
German doesn’t have the ‘th’ sound, so spelling it Neandertal gets English speakers to properly pronounce it.
In the Land of Nod, East of Eden, she was probably a fox. Now you know why Cain ran in that direction after God pronounced sentence for killing his brother.
Nebraska Man was a simple mistake, published 92 years ago, corrected 87 years ago.
Nothing like it has happened since.
Peking Man and Java Man are both today considered valid examples of homo erectus from roughly a million years ago.
Other similar fossils have been found from the same time period in widely scattered locations.
Evidence from mtDNA suggests that human and Neanderthal common ancestors lived circa 750,000 years ago, a time which corresponds to homo antecessor fossils.
But nuclear DNA also suggests a small amount of interbreeding between humans & Neanderthals, in the range of 50,000 years ago in the Middle East.
As for that German scientist convicted of faking some of his report data -- that was one man, years ago, in a field where at least hundreds work every day to discover and interpret data about our evolutionary past.
So his errors are not included in today's understandings, and should not be used to discredit the entire enterprise.
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