DNA Analysis Suggests Humans Interbred With Denisovans 157
ananyo writes "Tens of thousands of years ago modern humans crossed paths with the group of hominins known as the Neandertals. Researchers now think they also met another, less-known group called the Denisovans. The only trace that we have found, however, is a single finger bone and two teeth, but those fragments have been enough to cradle wisps of Denisovan DNA across thousands of years inside a Siberian cave. Now a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct their entire genome from these meager fragments. The analysis supports the idea that Neandertals and Denisovans were more closely related to one another than either was to modern humans and also suggests new ways that early humans may have spread across the globe."
wombatmobile linked to an article that focuses on the new techniques used to sequence the DNA of the bone fragments in question.
Re:Considering... (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all you have to provide a scientific definition of "race". What the Victorians had was anything but a scientific definition. They had no genetic data, no real knowledge of the migration patterns out of Africa. Hell, most of the Victorian racial theorists assumed that humans arose in Eurasia, and that Africa was some sort of dead-beat dead-end where the lower races ended up.
So, get to it. Give us a genetically meaningful definition of "race". I think you will find what most geneticists who have studied the issue have found, that if there are races; or more preferably sub-types of H. sapiens sapiens, they really do not line up very well at all with the morphological divisions that the Europeans set up. We have a much clearer picture now of how things went down when modern humans pushed out of sub-Saharan Africa. Still holes, but enough to tell us that simplistic notions like "negroid", "caucasian" and "mongoloid" do not give anything close to a reasonable picture of genetic patterns.
Re:Considering... (Score:3, Insightful)
you do realize that there are communities in Africa where you can take two random people, check how much their DNA differs, and you will find that that difference is "bigger" than the differences between most "Europeans" and "Asians", right?
the color of people's skin is related to the amount of sun their ancestors had to deal with. I'm not sure how long back in time, but probably a lot. the length of people's limbs and the thickness of their body has to do with the amount of heat their ancestors had to dissipate. that's about it.
what this means in practice is that if you take blueeyed whiteskinned northern people, and you put them on a tropical island, and you check again in N generations (I'm not sure how large N is, but it shouldn't be very large), then you will find black eyed people with darker skin, only because it's easier to live there with these properties. in fact, I don't think it would be very easy to convince blue eyed whiteskinned northern people to go live on a tropical island...
back to the issue of DNA differences: unless you have training in the area, don't try to draw conclusions, because these are complicated issues. for instance I read somewhere that when all you have to work with are bones, then you can say that two specimens are different species; but when you look at the DNA, you might say that they are indeed the same species. for instance pygmies are homo sapiens.
my advice to you is to either get a degree in the field, or stop believing what people said 100 years ago, when it was still acceptable to be a racist in many circles (thus the biased conclusions you've been reading).
Re:And this is news how, exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes much more sense, and is perfectly compatible with the rest of the plot, if you replace his period of muteness with a delay to learn the language. I have a suspicion this is what was originally intended but they did not want subtitles on the whole film.
Re:Considering... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all you have to provide a scientific definition of "race".
There are similar problems trying to define species, genus etc. DNA and other new data shows that the tree of life is more complex than we realised.
But a lack of a single simple definiton does not mean that species or race are invalid or unuseful categories.