Posted on 05/06/2010 11:38:16 AM PDT by Fractal Trader
There is a little Neanderthal in nearly all of us, according to scientists who compared the genetic makeup of humans with that of our closest ancient relatives.
Most people living outside Africa can trace up to 4% of their DNA to a Neanderthal origin, a consequence of interbreeding between the two groups after the great migration from the contintent.
Anthropologists have long speculated that early humans may have mated with Neanderthals, but the latest study provides the strongest evidence so far, suggesting that such encounters took place around 60,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East.
Small, pioneering groups of modern humans began to leave Africa 80,000 years ago and reached land occupied by the Neanderthals as they spread into Eurasia. The two may have lived alongside each other in small groups until the Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago.
Scientists led by Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig took four years to sequence the whole Neanderthal genome from powdered bone fragments taken from three females who lived in Europe 40,000 years ago.
To see how similar the Neanderthal was to modern humans, the team compared the ancient DNA with the genomes of five people from France, China, southern Africa, western Africa and Papua New Guinea. The study is the first to attempt a whole-genome comparison between Neanderthals and modern humans.
Researchers found that modern humans and Neanderthals shared 99.7% of their DNA, which was inherited from a common ancestor 400,000 years ago. Further analysis revealed that Neanderthals were more closely related to modern humans who left Africa than to the descendants of those who stayed. Between 1% and 4% of the DNA in modern Europeans, Asians and those as far afield as Papua New Guinea, was inherited from Neanderthals.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
ping
Ah the liberal gene!
And he likes barbecue...
ping
There’s news..
Just check Michelle...
I must not understand how that's all supposed to work...
I have a black friend who laughs about white supremists...
She says that people who do their DNA inveribly find a trace of black Af5ican in there background...
LOL
African
All can be traceable back to 8 people,
and ultimately two people.
“The study, reported in the journal Science, was greeted by scientists as almost certain confirmation that modern humans and Neanderthals mated when the groups crossed paths”
Men are such dogs...
Ermm...yeah, what’s so surprising about this. Leave it up to the eggheads to “discover” the obvious. There were so many other branches of modern Homo Sapiens ancestors that it would confuse the heck out of you. Some people think Neanderthal was the only ancestors we had. Wish I had that picture of the pre-Homo Sapiens Sapiens tree.
Yes thats right...
Mr and Mrs Noah..
or Adam and Eve if you want to skip over the flood story...
Men are such dogs...
_______________________________
I think we’ve all met up with the Neanderthals type who acted like a throw back to the cave..
No need to “skip over” the flood history.
You have two original sources of [perfect] DNA,
they multiplied into huge numbers,
then all but 8 were killed,
then they were scattered about the earth.
Dear Pentcave Forum: I never thought things like this really happened. It wss at the festival of the overripe fruit. She had a monobrow and a huge jaw, but my head was buzzing from too much overripe fruit...
Most people living outside Africa can trace up to 4% of their DNA to a Neanderthal origin,
According to the "one drop" rule, that means I should have entered Neanderthal on my census form.
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