Neanderthal Genome May Be Reconstructed

AP via Yahoo! ^ | 7/6/05 | Not given

[malakhi]

German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said Wednesday.

The project, which involves isolating genetic fragments from fossils of the prehistoric beings who originally inhabited Europe, is being carried out at the Leipzig-based institute.

[snip]

"Firstly, we will learn a lot about the Neanderthals. Secondly, we will learn a lot about the uniqueness of human beings. And thirdly, it's simply cool," Rubin said.

[snip]

[SunkenCiv]

Well said. It's definitely a human trait, IOW, not something we get just from the Neandertal ancestors. :')

[My2Cents]

LOL...Before their plastic surgery.

It's interesting...I remember some show on PBS years ago about the creation/evolution debate, and they had on some pretty famous paleontologist (can't remember his name), and he was foaming at the mouth about how creationists interpret the evidence, waving his bone fragments around as he made his point, and the guy looked just like those popular renderings of Neanderthal man, minus the facial hair, and in a suit -- low protruding brow, heavy-set jaw, and broad face. I thought it was rather comical to have this expert in paleontology on the program who looked like a cleaned up caveman.

[jpsb]

I believe the human population absord the neanderthal population by killing males and mating with females. Seems to have been a very popular thing to do back in the old prehistory days.

[RayBob]

[My2Cents]

Good find. Thanks.

[My2Cents]

Don't fall into the trap. Much of evolution is conjecture.

[Rytwyng]

Couple more points:

Blue/gray/green eyes are found (natively) ONLY in those regions formerly inhabited by Neanderthals: Europe and Middle East. Light eye color may be a Neanderthal legacy. (Please, no flames: I myself have blue eyes.)

Afrocentrists love this theory because if whites are part Neanderthall, it somehow makes us less human. So they'll want Neanderthals to be white (probably correctly) and King Tut to be a Subsaharan African (contrary to all known science.)

Of course the Afrocentrists have their own internal contradiction to deal with, namely 2 of their favorite dogmas, when combined, indict them:
(1) "Western Civilization is the root of all Evil", and
(2) "Blacks invented Western Civilization"
Oops!

[SunkenCiv]

a couple of links from the original Yahoo page:

Could Asia have been the cradle of humanity?
By David Ropeik, Globe Correspondent
July 5, 2005
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2005/07/05/could_asia_have_been_the_cradle_of_humanity/

[the next one has appeared as three topics on FR, and has been GGG pinged]

Walking with ancestors: discovery rewrites American prehistory
By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent
Published: 05 July 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article296886.ece

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Don't fall into the trap. Much of evolution is conjecture.

Not so. There is more evidence of biological evolution than you could read in a lifetime. However, much of the progress that's made in science generally is the result of false conjecture, evolutionary biology included.

But you can't expect too much from mere men. I believe this debate is part of God's plan and will work out in the end. ;)

[Rytwyng]

I believe the human population absord the neanderthal population by killing males and mating with females

It need not have been so brutal. When white Americans met with American Indians, for example, peaceful interbreeding frequently occured; it wasn't all wars like in the cowboy movies.

On the other hand, Valerius Geist argues persuasively that very little Neanderthal/modern interbreeding could have taken place: Neanderthal Paradigm Very little, doesn't mean zero however; it would only take once for the necessary genes to cross over into a modern population, where they could be selectively acted on.

[Little Bill]

More like the Vikings, my old man looked like a shield biter. At this late date all of my sisters and brothers are a whiter shade of Grey, and kids also, except for me, I am reddish, blondish, brown.

It sucks being of the cue tip generation and not conforming to head color.

[SunkenCiv]

My friend Val sent the link in email when that topic first appeared, and led me to FR. I didn't join until much later though. :')

[SunkenCiv]

Think of it as "resting". My mom hauled out a small, old, wood box (an old container for some product or other) and showed me a large clip of red hair, from my great-grandmother (died 1905). That color emerges here and there among the cousins and such. :')

[Heatseeker]

Of course neither mitochondria nor y-chromosome haplotypes show any evidence of Neanderthal mixture, but, if the admixture was at a very low percentage to begin with, the scarce Neanderthal haplotypes could easily have been wiped out during the population bottlenecks of the last glacial maximum.

Wouldn't it also be possible that the 'ginger gene' was a rare occurrence among H. sapiens sapiens which then got somewhat amplified during a cold spell such as the Younger Dryas?

[jpsb]

The only thing that could stop male human from having sex with female neanderthals is male neanderthals. Unless the females were get down ugly even by cave man standards with I seriously doubt. And that is a dido for neanderthal males and human females. If the two speices could breed they did. And that's a natural law.

[SunkenCiv]

I believe the human population [absorbed] the neanderthal population by killing males and mating with females.

The Neandertal female probably had less trouble giving birth to "hybrid" children than going the other way, but any interbreeding (and it's clear that such did take place) probably took place more or less peacefully and over long periods of time, and the genes wound up mostly Neandertal.

We are, after all, assured that the genetic variability of living humans is nearly zero (in that there is a lot of "junk DNA" that appears to be repetitive and does nothing), so there's no good reason to think that has changed.

[Little Bill]

One of the interesting things about history is giving guests your wife or daughter. Indians practiced this as have many tribes.

In small genetic groups inbreeding is not good, that is why wife stealing was so popular, see the Spartan marriage habits. Science rediscovers humanity, but then again there was the habit of killing anyone that didn't fit, and perhaps cooking them for dinner, mankind a strange and wondrous group.

[Sterlis]

------> Forget Darwin. Observe the power of entropy...

[trisham]

Wow! do you realise how ignorant you sound? Yours is the science of the supersticious, desert wandering, bronze age, goat herding, sandle wearers who wrote the 'science book' you base your 'theories' on.

*************

"Ignorance" is preferable to cruelty.

[trisham]

If you want to dispute something, why not try it with discussion? It beats throwing darts at someone else's intelligence and revealing your own lack of it in the process.

***************

Thank you. You said it much better than I was able to.