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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 ...
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Perhaps these definitions will help:
Here's my interpretation: autosomal DNA is a sub-set of Nuclear DNA which consists of all 46 chromosomes including about thee billion base-pairs, also called nucleotides
Does this clarify it for you?
mountainlion: "Also assuming a 50 year generation and 50,000 years the DNA would be so diluted that prehistoric dna of less than several thousand parents would not even show up."
Here's what shows up in DNA analysis of today's humans versus ancient Neanderthals: amongst humans, the differences in our DNA amount to around one-twentieth of one percent of all our three-billion base-pairs, or around 1.5 million base-pair differences.
Between modern humans and Neanderthals, the differences are around .12% or around 3.6 million base-pair differences.
But here's the key finding: some of those Neanderthal differences also show up in some modern human DNA, specifically, non-African humans.
No Africans have these "Neanderthal alleles".
So the suggestion is, interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals, most likely in the Middle East, when modern humans first left Africa to settle the rest of the world.
Does that explain it?
Does that explain it?
That pretty much explains things. My experience is in DNA has been in the genealogical area. Most of these articles are long on theory and short on detail. My family tree seems to go back to ancient Troy and I am trying to verify some of it through DNA.
The ancient Romans (i.e., Augustus) claimed their ancestors came from Troy, as extolled in Virgil's Aeneid, but to my knowledge, no physical evidence of that has ever been found.
Nope, there isn’t. There’s not even any meaning in the separation of Neandertal and us, we’re the same. The Replacement scenario is a body-beautiful/racial superiority model from the 19th century that is going to have to die.
Hey, miss marmelstein, it is a known fact, chronicled in the Clan of the Cave Bear series, that Broud was hittin’ on Ayla every chance he got.
Proof of the puddling was the birth of Durc who was a half-breed.
There is so much evidence for this interbreeding in the record of that series that you can’t dismiss it out of hand.
I only got to Chapter 2 in that book about thirty years ago!
How many studies do we need to prove ancient humans and Neanderthals were just as horny as we are and they hit on each other??
Well, it was different for a boy.
When I got a look at the cover of that book with Ayla bare—ly covered in fur, I knew that there was more to anthropology than old bones and coprolites.
I doubt if any claims of relationship with ancient Troy are anything other than somebody’s self glorifying propaganda.
That was certainly the case with ancient Rome, and doubly so with any more recent.
So don’t give them any of your hard - earned money!
I’m sure you know this information, but it’s possibly new information to others. The reason for Neanderthals extinction, was ineffective internal heat control. Their bodies overheated.
Neanderthal DNA reveals key differences from modern humans.
Analysis of DNA obtained from Neanderthal remains has revealed key differences from modern humans that suggest their bodies produced excess heat.
While in the cold climate of an ice age this would have provided the species with an advantage, as the earth warmed they would have been less able to cope. Ultimately this would have caused their extinction around 24,000 years ago.
Scientists at Newcastle University have put forward the theory after examining a particular form of genetic material which was obtained from the fossilised bones of Neanderthals.
By comparing it with that found in modern humans, they discovered that Neanderthals had key differences in the sections responsible for producing energy in all living cells.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, a neurogeneticist at Newcastle University, believes the differences in this mitochondrial DNA could have caused Neanderthals to be inefficient at producing energy, meaning their cells leaked heat.
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