[offinoNem]

This explains a great deal about many things...

[DrKirkNoliss]

If this is true it will severely hurt my faith. Serious post.

I guess you can belive in God nd think that he guided evolution to create Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but if some humans mated with other now extinct hominids and transmited their genes, how can you still believe in God?

[ORDERCHEAPVIAGRASOFTWARE]

That's probably because he knows he will appear in a Hera thread 40,000 years later.

[induffike]

If this is true it will severely hurt my faith. Serious post.

I guess you can belive in God nd think that he guided evolution to create Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but if some humans mated with other now extinct hominids and transmited their genes, how can you still believe in God?

By believing in God, and not in some human writings that while providing some interesting takes on history and morals should only be taken literally all the way through by superstitious morons?

[MicoSiru]

That makes sense.

Maybe they were subsumed and ceased to be a separate group, like say... Jeez, I can't think of an example.

Maybe they still exist side by side with the rest of us. That would explain Rugby League players

[b7RKli4l]

This explains a great deal about many things...

Can you be more specific?

[Kotyara]

Can someone set me straight here?

There's 4 % crossover in our DNA with Neanderthals. Why can't this be explained by a couple of humans mating with Neanderthals and the offspring being brought up in Neanderthal families, leaving Homo Sapiens Neanderthal DNA-free?

To put it another way, maybe they had some of our DNA, rather than us having some of theirs?

You are quite confused, read the link I provided and inqure about their method.


A bit OT I think this may point to other possible admixture in humans. I'm betting we will see some advanced erectus or other hominid admixture elsewhere in Asia in addition to the 4% N. that nonAfricans in general have.

[apatteopipt]

Since humans will even fvck chimps, dogs, and goats, I find it hard to believe that they didn't fvck Neanderthals.

[Toivaluadiora]

I knew this wouldn't take long.

What? Admixture happened with Neanderthals. They weren't the only Humans in Eurasia at the time, why so dismissive that other mixing happened? Multi regionalism lite seeems to have been brought back to life.


I hope they manage to get good genetic material out of Homo Floresiensis (aka Hobbits), it would be awesome to figure out once and for all what they are.

[Plulpangepler]

From the paper everyone here refuses to read.

Average DNA divergence between Neandertals and humans. To estimate the DNA sequence divergence per base pair between the genomes of Neandertals and the reference human genome sequence, we generated three-way alignments between the Neandertal, human, and chimpanzee genomes, filtering out genomic regions that may be duplicated in either humans or chimpanzees (SOM Text 10) and using an inferred genome sequence of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees as a reference (51) to avoid potential biases (39). We then counted the number of substitutions specific to the Neandertal, the human, and the chimpanzee genomes (Fig. 2). The overall number of substitutions unique to the Neandertal genome is about 30 times as high as on the human lineage. Because these are largely due to transitions resulting from deamination of cytosine residues in the Neandertal DNA, we restricted the divergence estimates to transversions. We then observed four to six times as many on the Neandertal as on the human lineage, probably due to sequencing errors in the low-coverage Neandertal DNA sequences. The numbers of transversions on the human lineage, as well as those on the lineage from the Neandertal-human ancestor to the chimpanzee, were used to estimate the average divergence between DNA sequences in Neandertals and present-day humans, as a fraction of the lineage from the human reference genome to the common ancestor of Neandertals, humans, and chimpanzees. For autosomes, this was 12.7% for each of the three bones analyzed. For the X chromosome, it was 11.9 to 12.4% (table S26). Assuming an average DNA divergence of 6.5 million years between the human and chimpanzee genomes (52), this results in a point estimate for the average divergence of Neandertal and modern human autosomal DNA sequences of 825,000 years. We caution that this is only a rough estimate because of the uncertainty about the time of divergence of humans and chimpanzees.

Five present-day human genomes. To put the divergence of the Neandertal genomes into perspective with regard to present-day humans, we sequenced the genomes of one San from Southern Africa, one Yoruba from West Africa, one Papua New Guinean, one Han Chinese, and one French from Western Europe to 4- to 6-fold coverage on the Illumina GAII platform (SOM Text 9). These sequences were aligned to the chimpanzee and human reference genomes and analyzed using a similar approach to that used for the Neandertal data. Autosomal DNA sequences of these individuals diverged 8.2 to 10.3% back along the lineage leading to the human reference genome, considerably less than the 12.7% seen in Neandertals (SOM Text 10). We note that the divergence estimate for the Yoruba individual to the human genome sequence is ~14% greater than previous estimates for an African American individual (56) and similarly greater than the heterozygosity measured in another Yoruba individual (33). This may be due to differences in the alignment and filtering procedures between this and previous studies (SOM Text 9 and 10). Nevertheless, the divergence of the Neandertal genome to the human reference genome is greater than for any of the present-day human genomes analyzed.

Distributions of DNA divergences to humans. To explore the variation of DNA sequence divergence across the genome, we analyzed the divergence of the Neandertals and the five humans to the reference human genome in 100 kilobase windows for which at least 50 informative transversions were observed. The majority of the Neandertal divergences overlap with those of the humans (Fig. 3), reflecting the fact that Neandertals fall inside the variation of present-day humans. However, the overall divergence is greater for the three Neandertal genomes. For example, their modes are around divergences of ~11%, whereas for the San the mode is ~9% and for the other present-day humans ~8%. For the Neandertals, 13% of windows have a divergence above 20%, whereas this is the case for 2.5% to 3.7% of windows in the current humans.



Fig. 3 Divergence of Neandertal and human genomes. Distributions of divergence from the human genome reference sequence among segments of 100 kb are shown for three Neandertals and the five present-day humans.

Furthermore, whereas in the French, Han, and Papuan individuals, 9.8%, 7.8%, and 5.9% of windows, respectively, show between 0% and 2% divergence to the human reference genome, in the San and the Yoruba this is the case for 1.7% and 3.7%, respectively. For the three Neandertals, 2.2 to 2.5% of windows show 0% to 2% divergence to the reference genome.



Four possible scenarios of genetic mixture involving Neandertals. Scenario 1 represents gene flow into Neandertal from other archaic hominins, here collectively referred to as Homo erectus. This would manifest itself as segments of the Neandertal genome with unexpectedly high divergence from present-day humans. Scenario 2 represents gene flow between late Neandertals and early modern humans in Europe and/or western Asia. We see no evidence of this because Neandertals are equally distantly related to all non-Africans. However, such gene flow may have taken place without leaving traces in the present-day gene pool. Scenario 3 represents gene flow between Neandertals and the ancestors of all non-Africans. This is the most parsimonious explanation of our observation. Although we detect gene flow only from Neandertals into modern humans, gene flow in the reverse direction may also have occurred. Scenario 4 represents old substructure in Africa that persisted from the origin of Neandertals until the ancestors of non-Africans left Africa. This scenario is also compatible with the current data.

Better question.

What if they had a progenitor? Wouldn't we see similar overlap?

Sigh. People on this forum know nothing about genetics.

Ben of course Homo N. and Homo Sapiens have a common progenitor. It may shock you but we and Chimpanzees have common ancestors, and probably all life on this planet has common progenitors.

People instead of speculating idly on their method, just read the godamn link I posted. Its a long paper but its worth it.

[VanDerSmok]

If this is true it will severely hurt my faith. Serious post.

I guess you can belive in God nd think that he guided evolution to create Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but if some humans mated with other now extinct hominids and transmited their genes, how can you still believe in God?

I'm a spiritual Christian but I do not believe in Creation.

[STYWOMBORGOSY]

The question is answered in the paper. Read it.

OK, I get it now, thanks. On reflection I should have realised with the African/Non-African part anyway.

[Tauntenue]

So I started to look at some Neanderthal reconstructions.





Come on, those guys could be straight from the local bar. They've really made neanderthals look more and more like us over the years!

[infarrelisam]

oh and lol at the pictures. Which amateur created those?

[Broker15015]

They are all humans. Neanderthals are not a separate species as they can and did interbreed with other humans.

I can't get past this. I've always understood it to be if they can breed, then they're the same species.

[appletango]

I'm too lazy, from cfc

by the look of some ancient humans down under, I'd say there was some mixing between us and the erectus population - including the "hobbits" of Flores. During the ice age much of Indonesia was a continent so migrating populations would have not only met up with erectus but eventually carried their genes into Australia. The people of Flores have legends of the little people (hobbits) placing them close by in time, not ~30 kya as the Neandertals were disappearing. My question is: why weren't the erectus peoples of SE Asia evolving in our direction? Or in any direction (other than shrinking like the hobbits)? Seriously, we're told erectus evolved into us - but this didn't happen outside of a small region of E Africa. The erectus populations that left Africa more than a million years ago didn't evolve into us or even in our direction, they stayed in relative stasis or got even bulkier like Neandertals living in ice age Europe. I imagine some of these "Neandertal" genes are actually erectus genes.

And aborigines not only appear more "primitive", they have myths of the "dreamtime" when they were among the first peoples to be created by the gods and their journey. Kow Swamp is a famous fossil of a 10 kyo aborigine with erectus like features. I dont think Neandertals had brains 20% larger, the average we have for them was slightly more than modern humans but we have much greater variation and range. Today's eskimo supposedly have slightly larger brains so the thinking is living in ice age like conditions produces larger brains for whatever reason.

[Nmoitmzr]

Can we guess that, then, probably neanderthals probably had a language and were not that different from mothern humans?

Otherwise, the interbreeding would only have been throu rape of Homo Sapien Sapiens females by Neanderthals, or nailing of Neanderthal ladies by pervy Homo Sapiens who were turned on by coarse hairy stocky women with no language whatsoever

Neanderthals used fire and tools. They buried their dead. Its most likely they had language. They had a FOXP2 gene identical to that of modern humans (its associated with language).


Its perhaps easy to dismiss their material culture as less impressive than that of Sapiens at the time, but one should keep in mind that most experts now agree that the complexity of the material culture is primarily a function of population density and size. So this could easily be an explanation for their "lack of creativity" or whatever, since they quickly adopted tool making skills from Sapiens once exposed to it.

[Soypopetype]

Hey Heraclitus, I googled some more and found something interesting about that aboriginal skull. All the images are from a specimen known as Pintubi-1 from the Pintubi tribe. The specimen is believed to have lived in the late 19th century but does have characteristics of an archaic homo sapiens.

http://canovanograms.tripod.com/pintubi1/

there's more images on the site.







Now, presumably other aborigines aren't the same although I can't say this for a fact because all the skulls I saw online were replicas of this specimen.

But how does this happen? Australia was settled 40,000 years ago, well after archaic homo sapiens had died out or evolved.

And it sounds socially scary but is it possible that there are morphologically archaic homo sapiens walking around today in Australia? It would seem there would be more scientific interest in this possibility but as a layperson, am I missing something?

[Ephejvll]

And then there are our Rugby League players...