Posted on 08/09/2011 11:36:54 AM PDT by neverdem
Modern humans may have picked up key genes from extinct relatives.
For a field that relies on fossils that have lain undisturbed for tens of thousands of years, ancient human genomics is moving at breakneck speed. Barely a year after the publication of the genomes of Neanderthals1 and of an extinct human population from Siberia2, scientists are racing to apply the work to answer questions about human evolution and history that would have been unfathomable just a few years ago.
The past months have seen a swathe of discoveries, from details about when Neanderthals and humans interbred, to the important disease-fighting genes that humans now have as a result of those trysts.
Click for larger imageNeanderthals were large-bodied hunter-gatherers, named after the German valley where their bones were first discovered, who roamed Europe and parts of Asia from 400,000 years ago until about 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal genome — shepherded by Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany — indicates that their evolutionary story began to split from the lineage of modern humans less than half a million years ago, when their common ancestor lived in Africa (see 'The human strain'). In December last year, Pääbo's team released the genetic blueprint of another population of ancient humans — unlike ourselves or the Neanderthals — that was based on DNA recovered from a 30,000–50,000-year-old finger bone found in a cave in Denisova in southern...
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Since then, scientists have fleshed out the details of one of the biggest surprises from the Neanderthal genome: humans living outside Africa owe up to 4% of their DNA to Neanderthals. One explanation might be that humans migrating out of Africa mated with Neanderthals, probably resident in the Middle East, before their offspring fanned out across Europe and Asia...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
So, who bred with the Rhinos?
immunology ping
First it was monkeys- now it’s Neanderthals. What’s wrong with these people? /s
McCain's mother.
Helen Thomas photo in 3...2...
I don't get it... my whole life I have had to endure the race pimps telling me that the only difference between whites and blacks is the amount of melanin in our skins, and that other than that we are identical...
But now scientists are saying every race BUT blacks has up to 4% of Neanderthal DNA... um... if I have 4% neanderthal DNA and blacks don't... doesn't that mean blacks are only 96% similar to everyone else?
Proud to be part-Neanderthal, quite frankly.
Great article - thanks for posting.
“...that was based on DNA recovered from a 30,000–50,000-year-old finger bone found in a cave...”
LOL!!! (More later if I can stop laughing.)
Ping...
Sort of like how some coyote populations are around 4% of wolf ancestry. That doesn't mean that they are only 96% similar to “pure” coyotes - because coyotes and wolves are themselves over 90% similar in genetic DNA.
They were saying many things with full knowledge of the prevalence of who gets sickle cell disease and trait, hemochromatosis, etc.
The still-prevailing out-of-Africa theory is at the basis of black claims that whites are descended from blacks. But the migration out of Africa, if it took place, was so long ago that the races were not so nearly distinct as they are now. In other words, a lot of evolution was yet to take place. This makes sense to me and perhaps to other evolutionists on FR, although probably not to those who dismiss that evolution took place at all.
When it comes to DNA you only need one nucleus from one microscopic cell!
And, now is about the time when some liberal academic is gonna tell me I’m descended from a monkey, or an AFRICAN “Lucy”, huh?
Wolves, coyotes and dogs are 100% of the same species in any case and can breed at will ~ provided everything is in place and they’ve checked it out with the pack and all that ~ and heat ~ must have heat!
Tigers and Lions can reproduce fertile offspring. Tigers and Lions are also separate species.
The list can go on and on.
"They" have found OLDER Homo Habilis in Western Asia. They were there a very long time ~ and in fact, overlap the time period for Habilis in Africa.
So, it's now Out of Western Asia ~ with literally EVERYBODY showing up later on Inside Africa.
You can take those Sen people and run them North from Souf' Africa, or South from Western Asia, and you get the same thing with the mitochondrial DNA ~ to wit, Sen people as the closest living relative to the oldest modern humans, with everybody else derived from a Sen ancestral group (except for the Neanderthals and this other group in Asia).
There are like 14 different strains of mitochondrial DNA, with the Sen having the oldest variety. All Europeans and East Asians have the same. All the others in Africa are distributed around in different groups all over sub-Saharan Africa.
At the same time the demonstration that the Neanderthals, a well studied group, bred with the people who became Europeans and New Guineans is very important. Note that there are NO Neanderthals in Africa and their "type" arose BEFORE the Sen people and all their different variations. Modern black Africans are simply not ancestral in any meaningful sense to non-Africans. It's quite the reverse!
"Currently, the domestic dog is listed as a subspecies of Canis lupus, C. l. familiaris, and the Dingo (also considered a domestic dog) as C. l. dingo, provisionally a separate subspecies from C. l. familiaris; the Red Wolf, Eastern Canadian Wolf, and Indian Wolf are recognized as subspecies.[1]
Many sources list the domestic dog as Canis familiaris, but others, including the Smithsonian Institution and the American Society of Mammalogists, more precisely list it as a subspecies of C. l. familiaris; the Red Wolf, Eastern Canadian Wolf, and Indian Wolf may or may not be separate species; the Dingo has been in the past variously classified as Canis dingo, Canis familiaris dingo and Canis lupus familiaris dingo."
They are regularly mated together ~ all of them ~ much to the distress of their owners who imagine them to be different species.
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