Neanderthal Sex Boosted Immunity In Modern Humans 190
NotSanguine writes "Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins were critical for our modern immune systems, researchers report (paper itself is subscription only) in the journal Science. Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day, they conclude."
Old news? (Score:4, Funny)
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If it boost the amount of developers I'm all for it.
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I'm sure this knowledge was a big influence on who Mrs. Ballmer chose as a mate.
Are you saying that his mate was trying to boost his/her immune system?
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No, she was thinking of potential offspring.
she's probably a typical gold-digger type of woman. the kind most want to be tho some are fat. the fatties who could not become gold diggers hate themselves even more for that and find refuge in a big greasy bucket of comfort food.
seriously. check the marriage statistics yourself before you dismiss me as a troll. even women who are millionaires want to marry men who are multi-millionaires. from seeing much of the world i can say that the abusive assholes who have lots of money are far more likely to
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I mean that women accuse men of being more superficial than women. We're as superficial as women are (IMO, I have no references to cite here and it's rather subjective anyway). However, I think we define superficiality in gender specific ways. Women spread their superficiality across assessments wealth, status, power, ability to dominate others (via personality) and looks whilst men concentrate most of it on looks. Then women use a definition of superficiality which fits male superficiality better than thei
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It also accounts for the robust constitution of Trailerparcus Bubbacus to this day.
Did Not Read The Fine Article FAIL, er... ure. (Score:4, Funny)
Must be why white girls give it for nig-nogs.
Definitely worth reading the article before trolling... it actually states the complete opposite:-
"At least one variety of HLA gene occurs frequently in present day populations from West Asia, but is rare in Africans.
.
The researchers say that is because after ancient humans left Africa some 65,000 years ago, they started breeding with their more primitive relations in Europe, while those who stayed in Africa did not
"The HLA genes that the Neanderthals and Denisovans had, had been adapted to life in Europe and Asia for several hundred thousand years, whereas the recent migrants from Africa wouldn't have had these genes," said study leader Peter Parham."
Also
there is a 8-inch uncut nigger cock pumping their precious little angle's pussy
Maybe their little "angle" was just doing it to be obtuse. She can get away with it if she is acute girl after all...
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Since niggers are more primitive technologically and socially maybe they are something something something
tl; dr
:-P
You're under the mistaken impression that I was taking you seriously in the first place and would read your half-baked "serious" troll. I wasn't, I was taking the piss.
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okay, at least this is coherent, but would you also agree that the ashkenazi jew is superior to other whites by the same criteria? or do you have some special reason for why jewish intelligence doesn't count (you wouldn't be the first)?
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Actually, Jared Diamond's geographic-accident hypothesis seems to work quite well for explaining how both Europe and Asia ended up more technologically advanced than Africa or various native populations. Many race-obsessed folks seem to forget about the 'Asia' part; granted, this AC did not make that mistake ("The white man _and the asian man_, that's who.") [emphasis added]
Also, Diamond does not as much lead to exalting all Europeans/Asians or condemning all Africans/natives. To be quite honest, there
Hey Babe (Score:3)
Want a better immune system for your kiddies?
Call me.
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Want a better immune system for your kiddies? Call me.
Unlikely... she knows that if you were really Neanderthal, you'd probably be using the phone to bash someone's head in, and you wouldn't even have a clue about the Internet. :-)
Re:Hey Babe (Score:4, Funny)
Or you'd be really mad about the Geico commercials.
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Joking, but Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans, actually.
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which means very little in and of itself.
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True, it's mostly due to increased bulk- but if a neanderthal were to exist today, he or she probably wouldn't be any less intelligent than an average person. Probably a bit more due to evolutionary pressures in the ice age.
ok. modern humans killed all the neanderthals (Score:2)
soooo the stereotype of neanderthals as hyper violent aggressors doesnt really fit the data?
wouldnt that stereotype be more applicable to, i dont know, us?
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Joking, but Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans, actually.
And an IBM 700 mainframe is larger than a modern i7 desktop. What's your point?
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*facepalm*
My point is that they'd most likely be about as intelligent as an average human.
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Similar to another part of (male) anatomy, it's not size of your hook, it's what you do with it.
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LOL
Well, we've established that you're a mouth breather anyway.
you really believe [etc]
Er, no. Exactly how did my jokingly observing that a neanderthals probable inability to use a phone is an obvious giveaway in the OP's chat-up line make you think that I did?
Let me guess- you discovered this "truth" recently and you wanted the opportunity to bolster your puffed-up nerd ego and feel superior by giving a "Santa Claus doesn't exist" lecture to some stereotypical woman-ignorant Slashdot geek. Sorry to spoil your fun, but while I may
PICTURES? (Score:2)
we are on internet, aren't we?
Interracial relationships.... (Score:4, Informative)
inter-racial relationships are almost always a white woman and a black man.
No.
Look about halfway down the page at a graph showing gender choices in interracial marriages. A smaller fraction of black women intermarry than black men, but the ratio is 22.0 % to 8.9 %. Not "almost always". Additionally, the fraction of mate selection (white, histpanic, asian, other) among those who do intermarry is nearly identical between the genders.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1616/american-marriage-interracial-interethnic?src=prc-latest&proj=peoplepress [pewresearch.org]
I should know better.. Don't feed trolls, especially cowards... But this whole race thing needs to be stomped where ever and whenever it appears.
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Additionally, the fraction of mate selection (white, histpanic, asian, other) among those who do intermarry is nearly identical between the genders.
Hispanic+non-hispanic white is intermarrying? Wow! Maybe it's my European perspective but it'd never have occurred to me to divide people in to hispanic and non-hispanic if Americans hadn't done it first. I can see physical, cultural and temperamental differences between Brits, Spaniards, French, Italians, Greeks, Swedes and so on but I'd never have put marrying a French or Italian woman in a different category to marrying a Spanish or Portuguese woman.
Woohoo, thank you neanderthals! (Score:2)
those DNA strands are awesome!
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Mate Selection (Score:2)
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In some cases though, it worked out.
I never understood why my wife ever willingly married me. Our beautiful daughter, who has a very robust immune system, appears to embody the explanation. That and my indisputable oily Guinea charm. Think Jersey Shore's "The Situation" with a PhD in literary theory.
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I never understood why my wife ever willingly married me. Our beautiful daughter, who has a very robust immune system, appears to embody the explanation. That and my indisputable oily Guinea charm.
Perhaps she found your "Guinea charm" to be cute? [homestead.com]
Either that or she was impressed by your life savings of £1.05? [wikipedia.org]
In the style of Ancient Aliens... (Score:2)
Way back when, the aliens landed. they needed a work force, but the locals (neanderthals) were too stupid, and the alien's genetically made workforce, kept dying to diseases.
So they spliced/mated their work force with the neanderthals to make, well, us.
hmm, i wonder if i get a really bad hair do, i can get on an episode of Ancient Aliens...
So, what you're saying is... (Score:4, Funny)
...that I should have sex with my neighbors?
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Yes. Assuming they're H. sapiens and you're interested in helping them out...
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Ah, the pool-boy. I was wondering where you were this summer, no tip for you then.
That is what sex is for... (Score:5, Interesting)
The neat organisms, in my opinion, are the edge cases that can go either way. this piece [nih.gov](sorry about the paywall...) examines snails that can either reproduce sexually or spawn clones asexually. As it turns out, in areas with higher parasite loads, the snails resort to sex at much higher rates in order to keep abreast of the parasite threat, while the less pressured snails go for the rapid and low-risk strategy of asexual cloning.
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Bacteria experience HGT via phages. So if one can say that sex can lead to sexually transmitted diseases, in bacteria diseases (phages) can lead to disease-transmitted sex.
Re:That is what sex is for... (Score:4, Interesting)
Compared to hunter-gatherers, residents of combination agricultural and town/city civilizations are horribly disease riddled. Animal husbandry means zoonotic diseases and parasites in horrific quantity, grain-based agriculture means truly hideous oral health, and urbanization means drinking and sleeping where you shit. It's only in places with 19th+ century sanitation and 20th+ century medicine that the advantages of wealth and technology in sedentary civilizations started to translate into disease levels less horrid than pre-agricultural ones(even then, things like the yearly flu shot because some new combination of porcine, avian, and human viruses has emerged is a classic animal-husbandry parasite issue).. One wonders if any other reasonably-smart hominids ever took a crack at farming; but had to give it up or die because their immune systems just couldn't hack it...
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Are you a proponent of the raw food movement?
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However, it is my understanding that the fossil evidence we have is pretty definite on the decline in population-level health(and the enormous increase in population density) once humans began farming.
what about black people? (Score:3)
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some months ago there was a study proposing that black people do not have Neanderthal ancestry. do they have a different immune system?
Yes. Click through to the BBC News article.
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No, the sickle cell gene is actually a positive adaptation - if you carry only one copy of the gene you are resistant to malaria, which is why the gene is common in regions where malaria is common. You only get sickle-cell anemia if you have two copies of the gene, and it's statistically far more likely to have one copy. So it's a trade off, but perhaps positive in the balance.
I can see them talking! (Score:2)
tell that to all the people that died of (Score:2)
Families Subject to Health Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
I've often wondered about some families I've known with continual health problems.
I have considered that maybe they did not inherit sufficient "protection" or DNA to give them resistance to certain viruses, fungi and bacteria or maybe more properly the ability to generate such resistance.
Given the article's credit to interbreeding amongst early groups and the variations in today's populations of ancient DNA traces, I am wondering more about my hypothesis.
We humans are very diverse indeed; it is more than skin deep.
Maybe it's nurture? (Score:2)
what if a predilection for fast food is genetic? (Score:2)
touche monsieur!!!!
News for Nerds? (Score:2)
Is it just me, or does /. has a real obsession getting to the bottom of Neanderthal Sex research? I search "Neanderthal sex" in the /. search and come up with 11 stories since 2005 (listed below). But when I search for conventional term "heterosexual marriage", all I find is a single story on "world of warcraft"... go figure.
Neanderthal Sex Boosted Immunity In Modern Humans 56
Neanderthal Genes Found In All Non-African Populations 406
New Ancient Human Identified 148
Neanderthals "Had Sex" With Modern Man
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Probably innate. Slashdot is largely pro-atheism, and subconsciously, if not consciously, the average subscriber knows they need to deal with the "human" versus "animal" differentiation issue at some point, as naturalism gives them no basis to create a distinction.
Naturally, failure to have a justification for differentiation has tremendous ethical implications, of which sexual behavior is one. A nagging pull toward an issue that would be unremarkable except for one's own psychological inconsistencies is
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There is no differentiation between animals and humans. humans are animals, albeit a specific kind. The morality we use to treat others of our specie vs other species is an evolved behavior. Morals are based on feelings and feelings are based on instincts.
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You kind of proved his point. News for nerds, indeed. Stuff that matters to nerds.
-dZ.
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On the contrary your completely logic free, ad hominen post just demonstrates that you're only an ignorant animal that reacts to arguments you don't like only with insults. You lose.
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Have you eaten a steak, and still maintain you have "rights"?
Why you, and not the cow?
Materially-verifiable differentiating attributes only, please.
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Have you eaten a steak, and still maintain you have "rights"?
Why you, and not the cow?
Materially-verifiable differentiating attributes only, please.
(Different AC here). The proximal reason is that humans eating other humans produces feelings of disgust, anger and shame (with some exceptions in some cases, times and places), and also because humans socialise with each other (humans do not generally feel that it is moral to eat their pets). Why have we evolved those? Disease? Social cohesion (similar to prohibitions on murder)? A side effect of some other trait? Chance? I don't know, but it does look rather like we have.
If you want a direct logical expla
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(Different AC here).
Doh! Oh well, I didn't care about those moderations anyway....
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Probably innate. Slashdot is largely pro-atheism, and subconsciously, if not consciously, the average subscriber knows they need to deal with the "human" versus "animal" differentiation issue at some point, as naturalism gives them no basis to create a distinction.
Have you eaten a steak, and still maintain you have "rights"? Why you, and not the cow?
Hmm. And how would you make the human/animal distinction in our ancestral past? Was there a creature which, in a sharp and religiously-defined human-animal or immortal soul-vs-unsouled(?) sense, had rights but had parents who did not? Or was there some level of continuity, from non-human apes to human apes as we evolved?
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So, just irrelevant relative distinctions regarding brain size, for which there are animal examples both less and greater than humans which you also don't ascribe rights to, rather than something which could justify it other than as a non-sequitur.
I'm already familiar with the other positions you mention. They also are philosophically incoherent in having no objective justification even offered for their purely subjective stances.
So, basically, same question. Again.
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To learn about Neanderthal sex we have to look at our DNA. This is completely in the realm of science - hence it is news for nerds.
On the other hand, heterosexual marriage is commonplace. The evidence for this surrounds us all the time and can be seen with our own eyes. This is neither news nor nerdy. And why do you make the connection between sex and marriage anyway? That seems to be outside the scope of the article.
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I search "Neanderthal sex" in the /. search and come up with 11 stories
Now try Google without the family filter. I bet you get more than eleven.
also no stories on how much Jesus loves us (Score:2)
i agree. slashdot has a clear bias against christian conservatives. it goes further than the 'ban on jesus' though. there is also the fact that it tends to discuss stories on Linux to the exclusion of products made by Christian corporations like Microsoft. We all know that Jesus believed in Capitalism - and obviously slashdot is some kind of Marxist plot to destroy both.
wrong wrong wrong (Score:2)
A true Christian company does not approve of homogenic workage
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It likely happened 35,000 years before the Bible was written so it predates the whole marriage issue by tens of thousands of years
Actually, marriage predates the Bible. It is not really a religious thing, more a family construct that helps ensure the survival of ones own offspring.
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Neanderthals mixing with Homo Sapiens has nothing to do with marriage or religion. It likely happened 35,000 years before the Bible was written so it predates the whole marriage issue by tens of thousands of years.
So marriage only occurred after the Bible was written? Which part, the earliest part which was written by Moses during the 40 years in the desert? Even that described marriages thousands of years prior to Moses. Overt monogamy (with covert polygamy, or at least cheating) is a strong part of almost every ancient culture. Although, some cultures practiced overt polygamy, and some religions outright hedonism (the priestesses of some greek and roman dieties had sex with all comers).
Now You Know Why She Married You . . . (Score:2)
Opposites attract (Score:2)
...for this very reason, and that's been known for some time.
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There's one way to bring competition back: allow polygamy.
Let the best, brightest, fittest mate with as many as possible and have their spouses/kids be under the same legal protection monogamous marriages are right now.
With most mammals, it's what nature does anyway.
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shoot... our closest relative.. the Bonobo, is hedonistic.
Re:The good old days of evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
You do realise that being the fittest (read: more succesful) in our current society, means being a total asshole with shitloads of money to pay for every single need?
There have been some tests that show that the happiest (non-suicidal people) are the people who arent stupid (120).
So that leaves us with a 110 IQ, rich asshole to mate with everyone.
That doesn't sound so nice to me.
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And thank you Slashcode for leaving out some of my post:
Not stupid (above 100 IQ), but also not too brilliant to figure out everything sucks (above 120 IQ), resulting in 110 IQ.
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Correlation is not causation. People need geological advantages. The places that weren't good enough to build proper societies were the places where the black people lived.
Energy seems to spark propper societies. For example the Egyption society erupted from flowing water and fish. But what do you do when you live somewhere in the middle of Africa? You spend the entire day walking for food. You're too bored so what do you do? You spend the remaining day fucking. Fucking means spreading HIV. So then you lost
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The largest society that non-neanderthal DNA has produced without major intervention from neanderthal infused cultures didn't even reach Aztec complexity even though population densities have been large enough quite often. It is quite probable there is a genetic component that influences social interaction.
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Which society are you speaking of?
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Marriage and procreation are two different things. Watch an episode of Jenny Jones, Montel Williams or Jerry Springer for details.
Re:The good old days of evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now would that be a society based upon psychopathic greed or intellectual prowess or humanitarianism or athletic ability or to stupid to plan ahead and use contraceptives.
Just want to clarify the basis of selection and not even look to touch on the issue of which is better for human society a matriarchy or a patriarchy. Just that at the moment it is fairly clear that majority polygamy based societies seem to be pretty unstable, treat the plural members of that relationship more like chattel, child abuse seems to be a national pass time and fairly backward.
Perhaps someone needs to explain the fundamental difference between humans 'a social species' and say lizards. It is not competition within human society, it is competition of the species who by collective and social effort establish species competitiveness. In fact it is very likely that to promote psychotic, lizard like, competition within the human species would break down human society and thus leave humanity vulnerable to direct physical competition with the rest of the biosphere (a guaranteed physical loser).
In human society it is basically insane to think of the rest of human society as the competitor and as something to be preyed upon, exploited and competed with. This is regardless of the last thirty years mass media messages that psychopathy and narcissism are desirable states of a mass consumption humanity (selfishness and forcing ones ego upon others).
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Ha! I remember a quote from Dune, where Frank Herbert states that the biggest competitor in any environment is a member of your own species. Think about it -- you're after the same resources, you've the same basic needs, and often, your survival could be at the expense of another.
Sure, it's easy not to think about that in a society that's rich and abundant with resources. But in a resource-strapped society? All bets are out the window. If you look at human history, you'll see that conflicts have happened at
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I see that no matter how obvious you are still blind, those places where "people are fighting over pieces of land with oil and diamonds", how competitive are those societies. Can they compete against societies where people work together democratically. You still fail to grasp the basic understanding that human societies that work together are more competitive than those that tear themselves apart, the kind of thinking you would expect from a psychopath or a narcissist, they honestly are incapable of viewin
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You're missing my point. I am not discounting that cooperation is infinitely preferable to conflict. However, to ignore the fact that a fellow human being (or a society) is a competitor to the same resource is ingenuous at best.
One can cooperate while being fully cognizant of the fact that when it comes to resource scarcity, there could be a conflict for a limited resource.
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Explain the competitive outcome of a suicide bomber, not the bomber but the victims. Explain the competitive outcome of a lethal home invasion. Explain the competitive outcome of a pandemic the kills across all social strata and individual capability. How about a lethal mugging, a plane flying into a building, a large bomb placed in a multi story structure, a bridge collapse, a toxic polluted environment, an industrial disaster, all of these take victims at random and are the true signs of a collapsing soc
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Are you being dense on purpose? Suicide bombers are the exception, not the norm. Even so, they are desperate attempts to undermine the opposition at whatever cost, even the ultimate personal harm to self.
Your arguments are wonderful in a society of abundance, but fail miserable when resource scarcity can be a reality. That is basic economics.
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You absolutely fail to grasp the idea that co=operation is an ability that evolves based upon autonomic empathic response. People do not co-operate because it is a good idea, real humans co-operate based upon genetics, from primitive to modern societies, that atomic empathic response drives co-operation. The sharing of mutual goals to achieve shared emotional results. I am not surprised you don't get it at all, it's genetic, you might see it written on paper or a computer screen but you can never understan
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This is the first time that I will say on Slashdot: I wish I had modpoints. Mentioning that a human is *not* just a zoological but also a social species, and the warning about rampant danger of psychopathy in recent years make it the best post, IMHO.
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There's one way to bring competition back: allow polygamy.
Especially in the absence of polyandry there will be considerable competition anyway in parts of China and India, thanks to their sex ratios.
Polygamy has some serious problems when it comes to human welfare. It tends to lead to a lot of violence and criminality - and, of course, to huge sacrifices of male welfare in order to be the wealthiest or most successful mate. Given that human welfare is the goal it doesn't seem very appealing.
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It's something that we're totaly screwing up right now, by trying to treat all possible diseases and letting all crap DNA survive, weakening our chanses of survival
...
Devolution if you will...
Adolf, is that you?
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You're so stupid that you asociate Jews with a type of DNA?
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No, Hitler and his cronies were stupid for that. Others will make other stupid and conveniently self-serving decisions about what constitutes inferior DNA. That's why it's best not to engage in eugenics programs.
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We could state that it's for stripping away diseases. If done correctly, like with medicine testing and aproval regulations, but for gene removal/altering, it could be done. But with great power comes great responsability; you have to do it right or you will suffer the consiquences.
But then again we also feared for all out nuclear war and it never happened, even though we have enough nukes and countries to blow the moon to shreds...
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So as long as we restrict things to, for example, the feeble minded [wikipedia.org] it'll all be OK?
We have already managed to prove several times that eugenics programs will tend to suffer "mission creep" with terrible ethical consequences.
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Are you so stupid you believe there are "types" of DNA?
You should have read my sig, but because you're appearantly too stupid, I'll make an exception for you, below:
From the fscking dictionary:
type
a number of things or persons sharing a particular characteristic, or set of characteristics, that causes them to be regarded as a group, more or less precisely defined or designated; class; category: a criminal of the most vicious type.
Now, you may not know it, but DNA can carry various sequences of characteristics we call genes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene [wikipedia.org]
So yes, I actually believe is have the type of DNA that made me a type (race in biology) of homo sapien.
To further proof that this term is actually used without dictionary-whoring:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling [wikipedia.org]
It appears that almost e
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ummm.... the point of Evolution is to strengthen a genome against the environment.... It is completely relative. There is no objective better in Evolution, given that, modern norms and medicine are not hurting us given the environment we live in... in fact, they strengthen us.
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eh??... watch http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ [imdb.com] ...
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Evolution is logic; that which dies, dies. That which survives can replicate.
Today, we let everyone replicate. If we could, we would let seemingly uncontrollable child cancer genomes replicate if we had the cure for it.
Imagine that there is some kind of natural disaster and everyone had child cancer?! "Oops, sorry sir but the power to the child cancer pill factory is torn appart due to some flood".
Yeah...
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Imagine that there was some kind of natural disaster like a disease that killed everyone that didn't have the genes for child cancer?
That's what has happened with other diseases.
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I surely don't hope the fear for this kinda stuff wears of like all new unknows stuff wears of. Before you know it you have to have ideal kids that are all almost genetically the same. Then you get the same weaknesses.
You strip difference out of the equation and your human defense goes down still.
But using this genetic stuff to entirely strip away disease is good. You just have to make sure you can replace the rock-solid system with your inteligence. It could be a bumpy ride and a silent killer if you try t
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Pedantic much? I said essentially the same damn thing, except I was talking in the end results of a pointless process.
Re:uhhh a tooth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your entire comment reeks of idiocy. You begin your tirade by implying that DNA is invalid because it happens to have been extracted from a tooth belonging to a subspecies to which we have assigned a name you feel is funny. You then begin a series of rhetorical questions that, in the order you ask them, express disdain for the government, a misunderstanding of what constitutes proof, lay out a false analogy between "rampant wild sex" within a population and interbreeding of moderately divergent populations in nature, and an implication that, because you lack the background and/or intelligence to understand how researchers arrived at their conclusions, the scientific community operates on authority instead of on evidence. Typically when I see that argument it's a form of projection, usually from a religious background. You finish your useless rant by completely ignoring that various avenues of research are being carried on concurrently, that evolutionary insights are absolutely central to HIV and AIDS research, and then throwing in an appeal to pity not really aimed at anyone in particular. The final syllable of your comment is "ha", by which you mean to imply that anyone who takes you seriously would consider your point established. Go back to conservapedia, creationist.
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those Africans without Neanderthal genes do not seem to have any weaknesses in their immune systems in dealing with viruses compared to others. True there are some illnesses that Africans suffer more than others, but there are also other illnesses that Europeans and Asians also suffer from more as well, so it seems to balance out.
"seems", unqualified, is a very non-scientific statement though. It sounds like an interesting hypothesis to test.
zoonotic disease vs genetics (Score:2)
a lot of those diseases you mention existed because Eurasians had domesticated cattle and pigs and so forth and so on - which directly led to zoonotic diseases. the Americas did not have cattle nor did they have pigs.
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"Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins were critical for our modern immune systems"
It also lead to the creation of soccer hooligans and red necks.
Look at the bright side, please: the soccer hooligans and red necks have better chances to survive viral infections. ;)