Posted on 11/29/2018 2:49:48 PM PST by ETL
Way more sex happened between Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans across Europe and Asia than scientists originally thought, a new study finds.
Scientists initially thought that interbreeding among the two groups was more isolated to a particular place and time — specifically, when they encountered each other in western Eurasia shortly after modern humans left Africa. This idea stemmed from the fact that the genomes of modern humans from outside Africa are only about 2 percent Neanderthal, on average.
Subsequent research, however, has found that Neanderthal ancestry is 12 to 20 percent higher in modern East Asians compared to modern Europeans. [In Images: The First Bone from a Neanderthal-Denisovan Hybrid]
"There's been a lot of debate as to why East Asians seem to have a bit more Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans," said senior study author Joshua Schraiber, a population geneticist at Temple University in Philadelphia. "There've been two competing ideas. One is that East Asians happen to interbreed more with Neanderthals. The other is that, of the multiple ancestral populations of Europeans, one had very little Neanderthal ancestry, diluting the [overall] Neanderthal contribution."
To shed light on this question of interbreeding, scientists developed computer simulations that modeled how DNA would get shared during a range of numbers of encounters between modern humans and Neanderthals. Then, they looked into which models best fit modern human genetic databases.
The researchers suggested the patterns of Neanderthal DNA inheritance seen in modern humans are best explained by not one, but multiple, independent episodes of interbreeding between Neanderthal and modern humans, first and foremost in the Middle East, but also later in both Europe and East Asia.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I am currently spending hours watching latkes cook.
No, those are women WITH hairy backs.
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All humans pre-flood were from 15’ to 20’ tall.
Then we started shrinking and losing IQ points.
The grave sites around the Ark are all huge.
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Who is doing your taste-checking?
I did my own taste checking and ended up too full to eat much at the table.. there are leftovers, come on by.
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