Posted on 09/13/2015 1:17:53 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestor -- or close relative -- of Neandertals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neandertals and modern humans, according to a presentation here yesterday at the fifth annual meeting of the European Society for the study of human evolution.
Ever since researchers first discovered thousands of bones and teeth from 28 individuals in the mid-1990s from Sima de los Huesos ("pit of bones"), a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain, they had noted that the fossils looked a lot like primitive Neandertals. The Sima people, who lived before Neandertals, were thought to have emerged in Europe. Yet their teeth, jaws, and large nasal cavities were among the traits that closely resembled those of Neandertals, according to a team led by paleontologist Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University of Madrid. As a result, his team classified the fossils as members of Homo heidelbergensis, a species that lived about 600,000 to 250,000 years ago in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many researchers have thought H. heidelbergensis gave rise to Neandertals and perhaps also to our species, H. sapiens, in the past 400,000 years or so.
But in 2013, the Sima fossils' identity suddenly became complicated when a study of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the bones revealed that it did not resemble that of a Neandertal. Instead, it more closely matched the mtDNA of a Denisovan, an elusive type of extinct human discovered when its DNA was sequenced from a finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
What is the difference between a species and a race?
Actually there IS evidence now that Ithink of it.
If evo is to be accepted as factual and we descended FROM apes, Apes and monkeys will pack fudge with abandon in significant percentages.
At this end of the timeline there are less than 2% of gays in the genpop. Ergo, as we advanced up the evo ladder, homosexually has documentedly decreased.
Game/set/match.
Settles science man SETTLED SCIENCE!!! ;)
Good point. The ones who are gay by genetics, if that is really one cause, should be gone.
The ones with childhood psychological trauma will be with us forever.
And if the theory of too much estrogen during pregnancy is true, those ones will be around too.
Worked with a lot of them in graphics. They live a sad and usually deviant lifestyle beyond the imagination of the average joe who gets his info from CBS, NBC etc.
Ellen Degeneres, Doogie Howser and Caitlyn Jenner are fed to the public as representative of the gay population.
They are not. Rosie O’Donnell is closer to the truth. I LOVE that her son joined the military!!
These non-Christians never give up trying to link HUMANS to ANIMALS.
But, the real “scientists” believe in GOD.
The sister in law mentioned above was gay. Oh do I know how screwed up they areally are...OHHHHH boy do I.
ops, where did that come from? LMAO....
Why do East Asians have 20% more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans?
Carl Zimmer | February 23, 2015
In 2010, scientists made a startling discovery about our past: About 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians. Researchers also have found a peculiar pattern in non-Africans: People in China, Japan and other East Asian countries have about 20 percent more Neanderthal DNA than do Europeans.
Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and the graduate student Benjamin Vernot recently set out to test possible explanations for the comparative abundance of Neanderthal DNA in Asians. The theory that made the most sense was that Asians inherited additional Neanderthal DNA at a later time. In this scenario, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans split, the early Asians migrated east, and there they had a second encounter with Neanderthals.
UCLA geneticist Dr Kirk E. Lohmueller and graduate student Bernard Y. Kim approached the same genetic question, but from a different direction. They constructed a computer model of Europeans and Asians, simulating their reproduction and evolution over time. After many trials, they found that a model that included a second interbreeding, another “pulse” of Neanderthal genes into the Asian population, fit the existing data the best.
But the two-pulse hypothesis also poses a puzzle of its own. If Neanderthals became extinct 40,000 years ago, they may have disappeared before Europeans and Asian populations genetically diverged. How could there have been Neanderthals left to interbreed with Asians a second time?
Higher Levels of Neanderthal Ancestry in East Asians Than in Europeans
Jeffrey D. Wall1,, Melinda A. Yang, Flora Jay, Sung K. Kim,
Eric Y. Durand, Laurie S. Stevison1, Christopher Gignoux1,
August Woerner, Michael F. Hammer and Montgomery Slatkin
Neanderthals were a group of archaic hominins that occupied most of Europe and parts of Western Asia from roughly 30-300 thousand years ago (Kya). They coexisted with modern humans during part of this time. Previous genetic analyses that compared a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome with genomes of several modern humans concluded that Neanderthals made a small (1-4%) contribution to the gene pools of all non-African populations. This observation was consistent with a single episode of admixture from Neanderthals into the ancestors of all non-Africans when the two groups coexisted in the Middle East 50-80 Kya. We examined the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans in greater detail by applying two complementary methods to the published draft Neanderthal genome and an expanded set of high-coverage modern human genome sequences. We find that, consistent with the recent finding of Meyer et al. (2012), Neanderthals contributed more DNA to modern East Asians than to modern Europeans. Furthermore we find that the Maasai of East Africa have a small but significant fraction of Neanderthal DNA. Because our analysis is of several genomic samples from each modern human population considered, we are able to document the extent of variation in Neanderthal ancestry within and among populations. Our results combined with those previously published show that a more complex model of admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans is necessary to account for the different levels of Neanderthal ancestry among human populations. In particular, at least some Neanderthal-modern human admixture must postdate the separation of the ancestors of modern European and modern East Asian populations.
http://www.genetics.org/content/early/2013/02/04/genetics.112.148213.short
I’ll never understand why millions of dinasour (sp) bones are found but few human bones.
A few hundred thousand years from now people will find skeletons like this on what used to be football fields.
Species is used in the sciences, but it’s made it into the vernacular, and there it’s illustrated by an example like this — we don’t refer to a “race of dogs”. Race still refers to division by one or more visible characteristics, such as skin tone, hair color, shape of the skull, etc. Since there’s really only one race, the human race, there’s not any meaningful breeding barrier between “races”. Often a species is identified by whether it is more or less isolated from breeding with similar things (flower with flower, equid with equid, etc) and/or can be bred with a superficially different organism but produce a fertile offspring. Using species to identify fossil forms relies (ironically) entirely on the morphology, that is, division by visible characteristics.
More dinos by far. More bone mass in most off
them to fossilize/survive time.
These non-scientists never give up trying to link humans to animals.
[snip] ...the persistence through time of extra Neanderthal ancestry in southern Europe needs further study. Populations within East Asia also show differences in Neanderthal similarity. North China has a bit more Neanderthal, on average, than South China according to the samples, though all are identified as ethnic Han Chinese. In Africa, the Yoruba of Nigeria have substantially more Neanderthal similarity than the Luhya of Kenya. This is puzzling, because the geographic location of the Luhya in East Africa seems better placed for Neanderthal similarity to appear, whether through ancient population structure or through the backmigration into Africa of Neanderthal descendants. Instead, the Yoruba in West Africa are the recipients of Neanderthal genes. [/snip]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3257696/posts
That’s one of my grade school classmates for certain!
Additional links and info at posts 29 and 30
....and basketball courts.
in the bonobo monkey, 60 percent of sexual activity is among females only.
That’s a staggering number.
It is high among the males too.
But it seems that unlike humans, exclusive homosexual behavior during an entire lifetime is VERY rare among animals.
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