Slashdot Log In
Neanderthals and Humans Diverged 660K Years Ago
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Aug 08, 2008 11:05 AM
from the big-chests-big-brains-you-do-the-math dept.
from the big-chests-big-brains-you-do-the-math dept.
Death Metal Maniac writes "The team analyzed the DNA of 13 genes from Neanderthal mitochondria and found they were distinctly different from modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans. The genetic material shows that a Neanderthal 'Eve' lived around 660,000 years ago, when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans. Neanderthal brains were on average larger than those of modern humans."
Related Stories
[+]
New Evidence Debunks "Stupid" Neanderthal 505 comments
ThinkComp writes "In what could possibly be a major blow to a scientific consensus that has held for decades, recent research suggests that the traditional conception of Neanderthals being "stupider" than Homo sapiens may in fact be misleading. As articles about the research findings state, 'early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.' The data used in the study is available on-line along with a visual description of the process used."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Are They Disavowing Their Ancestry? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that if they shared a common ancestor at any point, they'd always share a common ancestor.
Re:Are They Disavowing Their Ancestry? (Score:5, Informative)
I think they mean "last" as in last point in time. My brother and I have a common ancestor in my maternal grandfather, for example, but our "last shared" common ancestor would be our mother (or father).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My brother and I have a common ancestor in my maternal grandfather, for example, but our "last shared" common ancestor would be our mother (or father).
Well, at least your mother. Maybe not your father(s).
Re:Are They Disavowing Their Ancestry? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh come on. They probably had the same mailman for those two years.
Neanderthals and Humans Diverged 660K Years Ago
Odd, given the Earth is only 8000 years old and that Neanderthal (isn't it Neander t al now?) bones are planted by the Devil to deceive us.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Neanderthal" is German, and refers to Neander Valley. The spelling is historic and remains in Latin/scientific words and in English. Neander Valley is now spelled "Neandertal" in modern German and English. There is no /th/ sound in German, so the German pronounciation would be with a hard /t/ sound (and an 'ay' for the first e but that's picking nits).
Neanderthal Man is the pervasive English spelling, it was originally "Neanderthaler" in German but is now similarly spelled "Neandertaler". As noted abov
Re: (Score:2)
Well, since all life is presumably derived from a single-celled organism, everything has a common ancestor really.
What the article was trying to say was something like the latest common ancestor or when they diverged, although I think you probably realize that and are picking at the semantics. And I'm up for sem antics.
And since I guess its possible there are other species that diverged from either line after the split, it might not be quite correct to say "humans and neandertals diverged from each other..
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing really surprising here. The multi-regional hypothesis crowd will still complain that it's mtDNA, and not nuclear, and thus can be ignored, while for everyone else it simply bolsters the Out-of-Africa theory that the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans was H. erectus, and the Neandertal line spread throughout Eurasia, spending a few hundred thousand years there before modern human expansion out of Africa, for whatever reason, knocked them into extinction.
Re: (Score:2)
I think multiple genesis is far more likely than all life coming from one single-celled organism.
Re: (Score:2)
How do you explain the preponderance of right-handed sugars, then?
Re:Are They Disavowing Their Ancestry? (Score:4, Informative)
Two independent life forms could make the same right vs. left handed sugar choice with 50% odds. I find 1 in 20^64 magnitude odds more convincing: specifically the genetic code [rcn.com].
All life just coincidentally decided that CAG was going to mean glutamine? And with the exception of a few codes in mitochondria and a few eukaryotes, the hypothetical multiple genesis also gave us random agreement on the meaning of 63 other codons? No. If every cell on Earth agrees on 55 out of 64 codes, and most agree on all 64, it's a very safe bet that their translation machinery was an inheritance from the same ancestor.
Parent
Re:Are They Disavowing Their Ancestry? (Score:5, Funny)
Or that is just how FSM made them.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Although, the likely explanation for that is that life was more uniformly distributed and at some point, the ones with the commonalities happened to out reproduce the others a little. It wouldn't even take all that much if it's a positive feedback, and the way living things "recycle" the bits of other living things they've eaten, it probably is. (i.e. it takes less energy to convert or filter if the food already contains the proteins you need in abundance)
Ah, but... (Score:2)
Analyzing DNA (Score:4, Funny)
...so easy, a caveman could do it!
Best Buy (Score:5, Funny)
The Neanderthal genes are alive and well and working in the consumer electronics department of your local Best Buy.
Re: (Score:2)
You beat me to it, though I'd have mentioned a couple other places as well. Most of them involve people who wear guns for their occupation (or tasers) but then, that's a given... isn't it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Best Buy (Score:4, Funny)
Yes
Parent
That's unfair to the Neanderthals (Score:2)
Quoth the summary: "Neanderthal brains were on average larger than those of modern humans." I'm sure comparing them to those is insulting the Neanderthals ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget the unfrozen caveman lawyer
http://www.adequatulence.com/hartman/vault/pictures/caveman-lawyer.jpg [adequatulence.com]
(couldn't find a video clip, NBC is militant about taking SNL clips down and then can't be bothered to put one up on their own site?)
OMG!!! In just six years.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:OMG!!! In just six years.... (Score:5, Funny)
Bah, 640K is enough for everyone.
Parent
Re:OMG!!! In just six years.... (Score:5, Funny)
good math, sir.
Did you use a neanderthal calculator when you turned 6k into 6?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
6k is equal to 6 for very... very, very, very large values of 6.
Re: (Score:2)
Then I have some car insurance to sell you. :-)
that's impossible! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:that's impossible! (Score:4, Funny)
that's impossible! the world's only about 6000 years old.
Of course, but time is cyclical. There have been many Creations and Armageddons in the past. So what this means is that 110 universes ago, Neanderthals and Humans were related.
Parent
Re:that's impossible! (Score:4, Funny)
"There have been many Creations and Armageddons in the past."
Damned Hindu fundamentalists are ruining the internet!
Parent
Complete mitochondrial sequencing (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the summary didn't mention it (but TFA did), this is a big deal since unlike previous Neanderthal DNA analysis [isogg.org], this is the first time anyone's published a complete mitochondrial DNA sequence.
The sequence has 206 differences from the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence [wikipedia.org], which is about double the number of differences ever found in any modern human.
The authors believe they can extract enough uncontaminated autosomal and sex chromosome DNA have the rest of the genome done sometime next year.
It will never happen, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? Shocking! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? Shocking! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's actually a big argument for why humans and Neandertals may not have been able to produce viable offspring. As the lesson of the European sailors during the Age of Exploration shows, regardless of physical differences between populations, people like to fuck. We're only best by Bonobos in the horny ape department, and if some humans can get off on copulating with sheep and even inanimate objects, it's hard to imagine them not making it a Neandertal.
Parent
Not just that (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just that, but it's sorta funny when you look at the mitochondrial DNA (inherited strictly from the mother) vs Y chromosome mutations (inherited strictly from the father) for any human invasions or migrations, all the way to the earliest tribes. Invariably you can track the Y chromosome mutations sweeping across the land with the invasion, but the mitochondrial DNA tends to lag behind or even stay put.
Virtually all migrations and invasions _fucked_ their way across a continent. They displaced or killed the males, but then proceeded to "recycle" the newly widdowed women.
It makes sense too, since for most of human history females had a life expectancy of about 2/3 that of men. Birth and birth complications took a pretty heavy toll. So there'd be a steady supply of widdowed men who are still young and horny. You know, given that their life expectancy wasn't high enough to reach andropause. That was in fact a major cause of tribal warfare, and as late as ancient Rome and Greece we find it documented that getting women was an integral part of warfare.
The Romans, for example, demanded women from the defeated Teutones in IIRC 102 BC, in an infamous episode remembered mostly because the german women killed their children and commited suicide rather than comply. They first begged to be at least used to tend the temples of Ceres and Vesta instead, but the Romans refused, and the rest is history.
So indeed it would be mighty peculiar if the same pattern didn't apply to Neanderthals. The offspring must have been sterile or non-viable.
Parent
I might be silly.. (Score:5, Interesting)
And that, children... (Score:4, Funny)
Best Buy / Geek Squad (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, I resent your insensitive remarks about Best Buy employees being Neanderthals.
Some of us belong to Homo Habilis!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Brain complexity > Brain size
I haven't heard of too many elephant or whale civilizations found yet
Re:660K years vs. 10K? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it's the ratio of brain to body mass [wikipedia.org] that really matters. Neaderthals may have had a slightly higher range of brain mass (not much [wikipedia.org]) but they were much more massive creatures. And Neanderthals DEFINITELY had fires, and probably even rudimentary religious or spiritual beliefs. That does not a civilization make, but they are within our same species most agree.
Parent
Re:660K years vs. 10K? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a lot of debate as to what human-like abilities the Neandertals did possess. There are only a few burials, and while there does seem to be some ceremonial aspect to them (suggesting at less some capacity to invoke and comprehend symbolism) they're pretty damned primitive. Technologically, the Neandertals spent much of their time on this planet in a stasis. Advancement and innovation was excruciatingly slow, with much of it happening in the final few thousand years when they seem to have picked up on what the invading modern humans were doing, at the very least trying to remain competitive.
Of course, the flipside to that is that anatomically modern humans spent a good chunk of their time on this planet in the same sort of stasis. Sites in the Levant where Neandertals lived and where the first modern humans came out of Africa show that for thousands of years you could tell little difference between the two on technology alone. At some point over the last 100,000 years something changed in the way modern humans' brains were wired that saw a blossoming of symbolic thinking and technological and cultural innovations. Unfortunately, wiring doesn't get fossilized, and the best theory based on very slim evidence seems to be that a major complexification of language, from earlier more primitive proto-languages to fully modern language probably played a big part in this. The fossil evidence suggests that hominids have had the structural ability for a million years or more. We've got a long way to go on this one, and what's going to start to answer some questions is if we can start finding enough Neandertal nuclear DNA to start looking at genes like FOXP2.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Remind me to introduce you to my boss sometime.
Neanderthals were a bit more evolved, though (Score:5, Informative)
That may be so, but we have plenty of signs that Neanderthals were every bit as evolved as the Cro-Magnons (humans) at the same time.
They did use fire. In fact, occasionally they seem to have even used coal, something Homo Sapiens never really got into until Renaissance. They also cut down trees and used wood extensively. They skinned animals and used the skins. They used traps to hunt, in addition to spears. They built elaborate shelters. Their weapons and tools are every bit as evolved as those of the Cro-Magnons, and they too used tools to build other tools. (A chimp may sharpen a stick into an ad-hoc tool or weapon, and then discard it. Humans and Neanderthals built a wooden mallet to chip a flint axe, to cut a branch, to make a spear. Then keep them.) There are signs of _some_ work specialization, which also involves at least some societal organization and maybe even some primitive trade. (As in, I'll give you a leg of antelope if you make me a good spear.) They not only buried their dead, but there are signs of using grave goods and basically ritual burial. That alone hints at some primitive religion and a concept of afterlife. (You don't bury someone with food and weapons if you expect that he's just dead and rotting, and has essentially just ceased to exist.) But, at the very least, it means they probably had a few abstract concepts there, like remorse. We found stuff from them like a femur with holes drilled in it, very likely a primitive flute or such. They seemed to have decorated themselves with primitive jewellery and paints. That's a few more abstract concepts you need for those. Etc.
Basically, seriously, it's every bit on par with primitive Homo Sapiens. Go look at some forgotten tribe in the Amazon, like the recent ones who were trying to shoot arrows and chuck spears at a helicopter, and the Neanderthals weren't any less advanced than those.
The _only_ puzzling shortcoming about Neanderthals, is that there we found no missile weapons from them, nor any sign that they ever used missile weapons. Which may point at some shortcoming of their brain after all. Still, I wouldn't qualify someone as non-sentient, after they did all I've listed above and more, just because they can't do ballistics.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I think what you meant to say was "as anatomically-modern humans". They were definitely not as advanced as Cro-magnons, which were the first modern-looking *and* behavorially modern humans in Europe. There's some evidence that in those last years, the Neandertals tried to catch up with the technical prowess of Cro-magnons, but they ran out of time. It was Cro-magnons who ar
Re: (Score:2)
No, I genuinely meant to say "Cro-Magnons." I do some typos all the time, but not that big ;)
Re: (Score:2)
But toolkit-wise and behavior-wise, Cro-magnons were significantly more advanced than Neandertals. There's pretty much a line in the sand between Neandertal-dominated Eurasia and the arrival of the Cro-magnons. Cro-magnons were a part of a wave of modern humans that left Africa somewhere around 50k to 60k years ago and ended up everywhere (including, in the last century or so Antarctica). There were earlier modern human populations, the ancestors of the Cro-magnons are their close cousins who branched ou
Re: (Score:2)
That's because they're too smart to associate with you. You should see the videos of their ninja assassins in action.
Re:660K years vs. 10K? (Score:5, Funny)
The last traces of the neanderthal is about 30,000 years ago.
So, would you call the neanderthal's situation an Epoch Fail?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If I'm not mistaken, our civilization is only about 10,000 years old.
If the Neanderthal had bigger brain, there is a possibility that they had a civilization. That civilization might have discovered fire, internal combustion engines, rockets and even 27KM long particle accelerator.
I've fantasized about the same possibilities, and it's fun to contemplate. But how likely is it to be true at this point, considering that we haven't already found supporting evidence? Sure, a few hundred thousand years is a good long time for much of it to be destroyed and ground to dust. Yet if Neanderthals or some other dead race had had much beyond than batteries made out of lemons, why haven't we found even some basic artifacts or ruins from their vehicles, factories WalMarts, and nuclear reactors? We
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's almost as if these "scientists" and archaeologists were completely making up any crazy numbers they wanted (as long as it's less than 300 million and more than 10,000), and couldn't
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is a rather bizarre comment. Hunter-gatherer societies don't support large numbers. Whether it's Neandertals or moderns, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you need, depending on the environment, a rather large area of territory to make your living from (this is leading theory in the Neandertal extinction, that moderns simply out-competed them. 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of agricultural revolution, there weren't exactly a lot of people out there, but agriculture allowed for much more efficient use
Re: (Score:2)
They left the planet long ago
The elder race still learn and grow
Their power grows with purpose strong
To claim the home where they belong...