Posted on 05/13/2010 5:53:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
How much do we, who are alive today, differ from our most recent evolutionary ancestors, the cave-dwelling Neanderthals, hominids who lived in Europe and parts of Asia and went extinct about 30,000 years ago? And how much do Neanderthals, in turn, have in common with the ape-ancestors from which we are both descended, the chimpanzees?
Although we are both hominids, the fossil record told us long ago that we differ physically from Neanderthals, in various ways. But at the level of genes and the proteins that they encode, new research published online May 6 in the journal Science reveals that we differ hardly at all. It also indicates that we both -- Neanderthals and modern humans -- differ from the chimps in virtually identical ways.
"The astonishing implication of the work we've just published," says Prof. Gregory Hannon, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), "is that we are incredibly similar to Neanderthals at the level of the proteome, which is the full set of proteins that our genes encode."
Collaboration with a paleogenetics pioneer
Hannon, who is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is well known for his work on small RNAs and RNA interference, was invited this past year to help examine Neandertal DNA by Dr. Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in paleogenetics, a field that employs genome science to study early humans and other Paleolithic-era creatures. In a separate paper, Pääbo's team today publishes in the same issue of Science the first complete genome sequence for Neandertal, an achievement that builds on work he has led since 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Genomics in Leipzig.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
MISPRINT ALERT:
Should have read “...hardly different from modern liberals...”
They're trying to save evolution by manufacturing evidence.
I ave thought the same thing myself for a long time. There is something wrong with the scenarios being postulated.
Exactly!
Go to any dhimmiecrat party function and one will see living proof that Neanderthals were far more advanced than some modern “homo” sapiens...
My thoughts too.
"Scientists" can find damn near anything they want to find, take man made global warming for example.
So, in other words, Neanderthals are just some bad looking humans, not part of some evolutionary chain. Except perhaps the evolution of grooming.
Most of the Neanderthal specimens predate modern man in Europe. Not many of them were around by the time modern man showed up and they disappeared soon after, leaving few potential specimens to test.
I think the point of the story is that although there genes appear different, where the rubber hits the road, the proteins produced from active genes, are almost identical. That is very interesting and should lead to some questions that should challenge current assumptions about the origin of man.
Several recent articles with evidence that humans and Neanderthals did interbreed. But, only those homo sapiens that migrated out of Africa interbred:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/neanderthal/index?tab=articles
A Neanderthal kewpie doll ?
"Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.
Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.
But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.
Of course, to interbreed, you first have to meet. Some researchers have contended that the coexistence on the slopes of Mount Carmel for tens of thousands of years is merely an illusion created by the poor archeological record. If moderns and Neanderthals were physically isolated from each other, then there is nothing mysterious about their failure to interbreed. The most obvious form of isolation is geographic. But imagine an isolation in time as well. The climate of the Levant fluctuated throughout the Middle Paleolithic--now warm and dry, now cold and wet. Perhaps modern humans migrated up into the region from Africa during the warm periods, when the climate was better suited to their lighter, taller, warm-adapted physiques. Neanderthals, on the other hand, might have arrived in the Levant only when advancing glaciers cooled their European range more than even their cold-adapted physiques could stand. Then the two did not so much cohabit as time-share the same pocket of landscape between their separate continental ranges.
While the solution is intriguing, there are problems with it. Hominids are remarkably adaptable creatures. Even the ancient Homo erectus- -who lacked the large brain, hafted spear points, and other cultural accoutrements of its descendants--managed to thrive in a range of regions and under diverse climatic conditions. And while hominids adapt quickly, glaciers move very, very slowly, coming and going. Even if one or the other kind of human gained sole possession of the Levant during climatic extremes, what about all those millennia that were neither the hottest nor the coldest? There must have been long stretches of time--perhaps enduring as long as the whole of recorded human history--when the Levant climate was perfectly suited to both Neanderthals and modern humans. What part do these in-between periods play in the time-sharing scenario? It doesn’t make sense that one human population should politely vacate Mount Carmel just before the other moved in.
If these humans were isolated in neither space nor time but were truly contemporaneous, then how on earth did they fail to mate? Only one solution to the mystery is left. Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed in the Levant because they could not. They were reproductively incompatible, separate species--equally human, perhaps, but biologically distinct. "
“According to a new DNA study, most humans have a little Neanderthal in them—at least 1 to 4 percent of a person’s genetic makeup.”
The latest contention is that homo sapiens and Neanderthals did mate, and there is apparently new DNA evidence which supports that contention.
I guess the scientists will debate this one until one side or the other has irrefutable evidence, or as irrefutable as is possible. I’d bet that DNA evidence will be the soundest evidence possible when dealing with the ancient bones of ancient beings.
Anyone who knew my ex could have told you there was Neanderthal in some of us.
Again, neanderthal DNA is described as halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee. Trying to produce a crossbreed would be like the experiments soviet scientists did in the 30s trying to cross humans and apes; the subjects all died.
Yet more Neanderthal!
You keep saying that as if it’s “settled science” (to borrow a phrase from Algore) that that situation is proven to apply to Neanderthals and ancient homo sapiens. Scientist with new DNA evidence don’t agree. I’m sure the question will be further investigated and debated.
Cro-Magnon looks like us - Neanderthal does not. I keep thinking the media is confusing the two.
I think they're just trying to come up with a genetic excuse for liberals.
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