Posted on 03/18/2004 12:47:13 PM PST by blam
Study: Humans, Neanderthals Did Not Mate
By Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News
Neanderthal vs. Human
March 17, 2004 — The verdict is in: humans and Neanderthals did not date — much.
Genetic evidence from Neanderthal and early human bones indicates that if there was any intermixing of the two species, it was so little that it left no genetic trace. The discovery was published in the current edition of PloS Biology.
"I thought this was an incredibly significant paper," said Stanford University anthropologist Richard Klein. "So much of the time in paleoanthropology and other 'softer' sciences the arguments seem to go on forever."
This work by a team of European scientists led by Svante Paabo finally brings some solid evidence into the matter, he said.
For years anthropologists have been debating whether humans, when they wandered north into Europe from Africa more then 30,000 years ago, might have interbred with Neanderthals who lived there, said Klein. The evidence, until now, was mostly restricted to the shape of fossil bones.
Now, by isolating the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from four Neanderthals and five contemporary European early humans, the team has found no evidence of any noticeable genetic crossover.
Earlier attempts by Paabo's lab to extract intact genetic material from Neanderthal bones and comparing it to modern humans were inconclusive because of the difficulties of avoiding contaminating the samples with the genetic material of the lab workers who did the work, the researchers explain.
That's why this time they compared the mtDNA from Neanderthals to their contemporary humans — all of whom had mtDNA very different from modern humans.
That's not to say no mixing went on, the researcher cautioned. It would take a lot more samples from a larger number of fossils to rule out small amounts of mixing.
"About 50 early modern human remains would need to be studied to exclude a Neanderthal [sic] mtDNA contribution of ten percent," Paabo and his colleagues reported. "To exclude a five percent contribution, one would need to study more early modern human remains than have been discovered to date."
So the final word on how little the Neanderthals contributed to the modern human gene pool is that it's impossible to say.
For Klein's part, he suspects that humans and Neanderthals were just too different to find each other romantically interesting. "It's not that they couldn't, perhaps, but they probably weren't interested."
Early humans would have probably found Neanderthals very odd-looking and strange-acting, said Klein. So odd-looking, he said, that if you dressed a Neanderthal in a suit and put him on a subway, most people would probably move to another car.
The very prominent jaw and cheekbones, the large nose, as well as the swept-back forehead and low I.Q., would probably make a Neanderthal appear repulsive to most humans.
I always liked this picture. Like seeing a long-lost family member or something.
You're gonna fit right in in Texas. But you gotta learn the drawl before we can issue you a certificate.
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