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.
No kidding (Score:1)
I'd like to cross my DNA with Irina Denisova too!
Denisovans Extinct? (Score:4, Funny)
I beg to differ. The Denisovan's were our next-door neighbors, when I was in grade-school.
Re:Denisovans Extinct? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Denisovans Extinct? (Score:4, Funny)
Carbon dating myself....
Re:Denisovans Extinct? (Score:4, Funny)
Strange, he didn't mention he's from Arkansas...
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I think THOSE jokes belong back on the circumcision/foreskin thread, no?
Denisovans are not exinct (Score:5, Informative)
Many Melanesians, Indonesians, Malays, Polynesians, Filipinos, as well as indigenous tribe on island of Taiwan, have Denisovan genes in them
In fact, this isn't news anymore
Back in 2010 there have been reports of similar findings. Here's one report from the BBC -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12059564 [bbc.co.uk]
Regarding the Neanderthal genes (Score:3)
The way I look at it - not scientifically based - just my own observation:
While the Denisovan genes are in the bloodline of the islandic people of mainly West side of the Pacific Ocean, the Neanderthal genes are in the European and Asian bloodline - although percentage wise the Europeans have more than the Asians
It seems to be that the Africans south of the Sahara Desert who are have the most "pure" Homo Sapien Sapien bloodline
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DNA, like any organic molecule, is prone to decomposition in warm and/ or wet conditions.
The Denisovan DNA was found in bones in a cave in a mountainous area of Siberia.
The "hobbits" bones were found in a low-altitude cave in the tropics.
While "hobbit" DNA would be absolutely fascinating to discover, the odds are not good.
Which doesn't s
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and native Australians
There is no such thing
Kangaroos?
Wombats?
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Lung fish (not to be confused with the African ones ; a very different taxon)?
And lots and lots of impressively nasty invertebrates.
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Well, Cain was always pressing for the family to come over. He was a real pr!ck, tho. We much more enjoyed his brother Abel.
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I believe that it was a reliance on anecdotal evidence that extended his days...
Considering... (Score:5, Funny)
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Different human groups always have and always will interbreed to leave just the "human" race.
The species keeps evolving. It'll probably change in ways drastic enough that we wouldn't even recognize it as "human" anymore. Well, except for that interbreeding thing.
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Re:Considering... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the authors of this study or the others I read was talking about how he believed for a long time that Neandarthals are a sub-species of homo sapiens, while from this un-mixed homo sapiens are more closely related to the original and modern-day Africans, and then this Denisovans are related to more eastern groups including Pacific Islanders, Aboriginal Australian, and (maybe) what was classically related to Mongoloids?
Still homo sapiens from a breeding standpoint but noticeably distinct even if it's 0.1-0.5% of the DNA. Doesn't mean anyone is better than others but we're phenotypically different if only in body morphology.
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Not only is it not PC, it's wrong.
I mean, wow, right out of 100 years ago.
It's dead, Jim.
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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 stud
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Provide us with a scientific definition of "language". Or else we'll have to give up on simplistic notions like English, German and French as well.
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Language boundaries are defined by mutual intelligibility of the communication system. This can be simplistic, but it provides a good first approximation that is testable. There are border cases (such as language chains), but on the whole it is a useful definition.
In comparison, dialect contours are defined in terms of specific language features. What speakers call a "dialect" is an identification, and while this may correspond roughly to collections of language features, it is really a sociolinguistic defi
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.
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Species is fairly simple:
Two animal varieties are of the same species if, given a chance, they interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
Now this causes problems when you adopt a simple model, and then encounter ring species, like herring gulls. But it works fine for local populations. Just don't expect a global definition and it's ok.
Genus is a totally artificial construct created by people to make their theories simpler to describe. It doesn't have any natural validity, any more than green or blue does.
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What was that you were saying?
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Species is defined on populations, not on individuals. If Kekaimalu bred with another wholphin, they might have a chance to establish a breeding population. If, however Kekaimalu didn't breed, then it wouldn't count at all. If it bred with either a dolphin or another false killer whale, then it would most probably just act as a means in interspecific gene transport. It's quite unlikely that it would establish a viable breeding population. But if they did, then it could result in a new species. (I don
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Two animal varieties are of the same species if, given a chance, they interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
Define "given a chance". What if their physiology precludes them from mating, but artificial insemination would produce fertile offspring?
Also, in most cases the offspring is not 100% infertile, but rather there is a chance of infertility. For example, not all mules are actually infertile. On the other hand, even within what we conventionally see as species, there is also a certain percentage of people born infertile due to how the genes of their parents combined. Where do you draw the line?
All these catego
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Uh, oh... now we have to define "useful" :)
If you are trying to use "race" to predict how medication might affect a person, you will probably be disappointed. Sure, you can ask people to self-identify and see patterns emerge from the "black" and "white" and "Asian or Pacific Islander" categories... but at the end of the day, as a physician, when a black guy walks into your office you can't give him any kind of certainty as to what his specific reaction might be. So race is useless in this context.
If you are
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In medicine, there are a lot of pragmatic associations with race. For example, there is a gene that is moderately widespread in the Caribbean population which makes them especially sensitive to morphine compounds. Sometimes people have violent coughing, and codeine is a standard treatment, but in patients with sensitivity to codeine, a normal dose can cause a life-threatening or fatal overdose with depression of breathing and blood pressure.
So as a physician, if a black Caribbean guy walks into your office
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So as a physician, if a black Caribbean guy walks into your office with a severe cough, you would be more careful about prescribing codeine.
But if a black guy walks into your office, you have nothing without knowing that they are also from the Caribbean.
You might have a Polynesian who self-identifies as Caribbean, and the racial category would be misleading.
Or, more likely, you'd have a guy who is 1/4 "black" and looks white and you'd miss the link altogether even though he carries the gene. Unless you approach all of your patients with the same caution, you'll run into trouble. This is why my wife's OB made me get a sickle-cell trait test even though I'm white.
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Yes, I've heard the song "Strange Fruit".
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Wasn't Greece busy inventing astronomy and democracy while the Germans were still banging rocks together?
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First of all you have to provide a scientific definition of "race".
One such can be provided via morphology. It's good enough to determine general ethnicity (as we define it) of skeletons, for example.
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It's actually pretty easy to come up with an objective and accurate definition of race. You just take various genes, and start looking for those which cluster nicely according to the "everyday" definition of race. Once you've found such a group, then that's your scientific definition. And you can get such groups that correlate extremely well with "everyday" definition, like 95% accuracy - which is not at all surprising, since both our simplistic notion of race, and genetic diversity, both have roots in geog
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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 diss
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My caveat would be that I also know that basically anyone >2 cousins apart (I believe) have about the same DNA matching as a % of total DNA. However, the total % is not a very fair comparison between two closely related populations. The X% difference between your two African populations is probably substantially different be
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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?
This is the case because both Europeans and Asians are descendants of different, and relatively small,groups of African hominids that left the continent early on, and who have interbred at some point. So Africa has by far the most genetic diversity, since that's where most of the genetic material of our species remained throughout our history.
That said, if you check specific parts of DNA for differences (basically, things that are responsible for most prominent features in the phenotype), you can easily fin
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A DNA sample can also be used to identify the race of a person.
You sure about that? I have some kids with African, European, and American ancestry and I'd love you to tell me what their "race" is, with or without a DNA sample.
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Then there wouldn't be any "black" people in America, and all of the Hispanics would be "mixed" as well.
If your cataloging system can't actually catalog anyone, it's useless.
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My non-existent cataloging system is exactly as effective as yours. That's my point. You are wasting your time and I am not.
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Hmm. An anthropologist can look at a thigh bone and identify the race of the person it came from.
I don't think modern anthropologists talk about race any more. They talk about "populations."
A DNA sample can also be used to identify the race of a person. I think we're dealing with a little more than skin color here.
DNA sequencing of many populations around the world shows how related different populations are, but the populations don't correspond to 19th-century categories of races.
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I could see a few hundred millennial from now our descendants digging up bones on different continents classifying them into differ
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A worthy point, but an invalid one.
These groups *were* largely reproductively isolated. This doesn't require that they couldn't interbreed. Not when the world is large, and travel is slow, dangerous, and uncomfortable. (Did you know that travel and travail were the same word with the combined meaning until around the time of the railroad.) So the groups didn't have much chance to interbreed. Populations were SMALL, especially in the north, and small isolated populations experience lots of genetic drift
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Genetically there are something like 5 or 6 six races. Five races of sub-Saharan Africans, and then a sixth race everyone else. We know enough about the genetic makeup of various populations to put to rest pretty much all of Victorian racial theory.
The problem here is concentrating on what usually amount to relatively insignificant morphological features of modern H. sapiens. Many features like skin color, shape of the eyes, slight deviations in skull shape, and so on are really very recent changes in moder
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I seem to remember that 4% of european/whitey DNA can be traced to Neanderthal?
Yes, and Asian and Aboriginal Australian, according to the linked Wikipedia article.
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The world of human genetics, according to Svante Pääbo*:
A first wave of humans left Africa on the order of half a million years ago. These lead to the Neandertals and probably the Denisovans. (But perhaps the Denisovans were a separate migration.)
On the order of 100,000 years ago, modern humans left Africa. On the way, they did a little interbreeding with Neandertals, so that all modern non-Africans are about 4% Neandertal by descent.
A subpopulation of these interbred with the Denisovans, and this
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To follow the PC approach of being blind that there ARE differences (if only morphological) between groups of humans just promotes ignorance. I want to understand how these migration patterns developed. I get the impression these scientists are under a lot of pressure to make sure that everyone was well-mixed 60-100,000 years ago an
Re:Considering... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not actually unlikely. And the same reasoning would show why Neanderthal mitochondria don't show up in modern humans.
In particular, it appears (or has appeared to a few anthropoligists several years ago) that Neanderthal women had a smaller birth canal that Cro-Magnon women, so if a normal Cro-Magnon infant were to attempt to be born to a Neanderthal woman, there would likely be a brith problem fatal to both the mother and the child. Going the other way around, however, should work. Neanderthal heads were slimmer than Cro-Magnon heads. And since mitochondria are only inherited along the maternal line, that would explain the absence of Neanderthal mitochondria in modern humans.
This may not be quite what you meant, but it's the way I think it happened.
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Lol, I first misread the headline as "interbred with dinosaurs". Well, the creationists at least might think that was possible.
I would almost go to a creationism museum to see the graphics for that. Can you imagine this [dailymail.co.uk] shooped with a woman's body on the bottom?
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Do you think the one on the bottom is being legitimately raped or does it have ways of shutting the whole thing down?
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Do you think the one on the bottom is being legitimately raped or does it have ways of shutting the whole thing down?
Well, if I was the sort of person that would go to a creationist museum to see these graphics then yes, I would believe her body would shut it down if it was a legitimate rape. However, take a look at the smile on that bottom Tyranny's face? That's no "legitimate" rape!
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Lol, I first misread the headline as "interbred with dinosaurs". Well, the creationists at least might think that was possible.
The creationists would probably label it as sauromy and point it out as one of the reasons for the global flood.
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(Speaking as a full-time geologist and part-time palaeontologist, birds are not dinosaur descendants ; birds are dinosaurs. For all meaningful values of "bird", "are", and "dinosaur.")
Clone possibility? (Score:1)
>> Now a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct their entire genome from these meager fragments.
So, can they be re-created?
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>> Now a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct their entire genome from these meager fragments.
So, can they be re-created?
Another Jurassic Park sequel is even more likely.
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IIRC, the team managed to get 91% of the genome down 'pretty accurately'. That is a technological tour-de-force [sciencemag.org] in and of itself but likely not enough to 'clone' somebody. Unless, perhaps, you added additional 'spacer' DNA - like from a frog.
"I'm French, how do you think I got this outrageous accent?"
"What are you doing in England then?"
"Mind your own business."
Na, would never work.
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Listen... (Score:2, Informative)
Humans have tried to interbreed with just about every species imaginable. Sheep, for instance. And, when drunk, even animals which sometimes predate upon humans. So I have no doubt that modern humans have interbred with Denisovan babes. We are some seriously horny, depraved bastards.
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Actually the study determined that the most common type of mating was Denisovan males with human females.
The GP didn't say anything about genders. Anyone who has been around women know that they like to get freaky.
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The GP didn't say anything about genders. Anyone who has been around women know that they like to get freaky.
GP said:
So I have no doubt that modern humans have interbred with Denisovan babes.
And said:
We are some seriously horny, depraved bastards.
Those words have gender, and using them in the context suggests the GP thought it was mainly men getting freaky.
Signed,
Someone who's been around lots of women.
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I've heard both terms used to refer to both males and females. Connotation, I'll give you.
And this is news how, exactly? (Score:1)
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It seems to me that Kirk's babes were all as human as he was. Like a lot of TV shows and movies from the 50s and 60s, TOS often assumed that other planets would be inhabited by people. TOS sometimes portrayed aliens as having weird physical features (as TNG and its sequels always did), but mostly the "aliens" looked like they came from Southern California — as indeed they did.
I recently re-watched the original Planet of the Apes. When I first saw it 40 years ago, the teenage me was not bothered by the
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.
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What you're saying is, if I go to a random planet inhabited by intelligent life, I should expect to find people and apes; the only thing screwy about this planet Taylor has discovered is that the apes can talk and the people can't.
Sorry, that's bad science. It ignores an observed scientific fact: divergent evolution [wikipedia.org]. When an ecosystem is isolated, it evolves species that are different from those that evolved elsewhere. The longer it's isolated, the more different it is. That was demonstrated when Australia,
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The proto race was invented much later, in TNG. It was one of many silly attempts to explain small stuff, like that plague that made Klingons look like humans. The writers for the TOS were less careful about science, and didn't see any contradictions in having aliens look human.
Besides, why did most of the aliens Kirk met look like plain humans, while the aliens Picard met all look like people wearing latex masks?
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovanitch (Score:2)
Uh uh uh, oh oh oh, ug ug ug. Home Sapiens girls are easy.
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So are homo-sapiens men.
This is why we're still around.
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Fun fact: of all the apes, humans have the largest penis by both length and circumference, but not the biggest balls.
Go to any college bar on Friday night (Score:2)
And you'll see plenty of humans breeding with Neandertals.
Alyson Hannigan (Score:4, Funny)
Alyson Hannigan is modern-day proof of homo sapiens interbreeding with Denisovans.
A total of five (Score:2)
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We do know that while the Neandertals persisted to within 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, the last Neandertals, like the group found on Gibraltar, were marginalized. It seems reasonably likely that pre-modern members of genus Homo in Eurasia never had that high a population, in no small part because wide portions of Eurasia were pretty inhospitable and could not support dense populations. If there was even a small breeding differential between any of these groups and modern Humans, over twenty or thirty thousan
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It's funny how only two species of recent hominids are commonly known
Not funny at all. The first Neanderthals were dug up in 1829, and have had plenty of time to become a feature of popular culture. Except for the unavoidable Modern Humans, every other hominid is a very recent discovery. The Red Deer Cave people were only discovered in 1979. Hobbits and Denisovans were only discovered in the last decade,
Homo floresiensis? (Score:2)
The relatively close proximity of Homo florsiensis remains (Indonesia) and the supposed-partly-descended-from-Denisovans modern population (Melanesia) leads me to speculate that H. floresiensis and Denisovans might be the same. Undoubtedly we'll find out in due course. The big problem is the distance between Indonesia and Siberia - if the (sub)species was so wide spread, we'd expect to have many more remains in between.
Humans... (Score:2)
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Definition of "species" (Score:2)
Wait, but if we could breed successfully with them then they were not really a different species, by definition. "Race" would be the more accurate word.
"A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring."
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"Race" would be the more accurate word.
Not really, because that term has too many emotional/political/social connotations, and is routinely misused in common speech. Biologists mostly use the term "subspecies", which is a synonym without the connotations.
"A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring."
That's often the first definition given in textbooks, followed by explanations of why it's not a very good definition due to its fuzziness. Thus, one of the common textbook examples discusses wolves, jackals and domestic dogs. Our pet dogs can interbreed with both wolves and jackals, so the
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I understand, and still prefer my definition.
Because it will always be fussy and most importantly because I do not want a group of animals I flew to an island previously uninhabited with animals of that type to suddenly become a new species.
The first definition is the only one that makes any kind of sense, and yes many many examples exists of this web of subspecies with no clear species groupings.
And you are right about Race, but subspecies has its own connotations and in general human subspecies are called
Amazing Progress (Score:2)
To think the discovery of the structure of DNA is only 60 years old. I believe James Watson is still alive. Sort of like the first moon landing was only 66 years after the first manned powered flight. Or the progress from the first transistor to the modern laptop that has five plus billion of them. Anyone care to give some other examples?
Well chronicled (Score:2)
the real significant development here (Score:2)
More Proof.. (Score:2)
... that humans will have sex with anything..
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I was already going there myself. If it were possible to sire offspring which were part human and part sheep, we would have seen them all over the place thousands and thousands of years ago.
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Thanks for the imagery.
My first thought was 'So thankful that humans and trees don't produce viable offspring' which lead to 'I wonder if referencing humans who mate with vegetables is appropriate here'.. leading to ..well.. 'anything'.
Hey (Score:2)
Yawn ... (Score:2)
This is completely useless information that only a paleontology/anthropology dweeb can regard as news to get excited about.
None of this is going to result in anything that improves human lives in any way.
With just the slightest squint of the eyes, "Neanderthal" and "Denisovan" become synonyms. Basically it's just a word game: let's arbitrarily divide the prehistoric ancestors into two groups and give them different names, and then pretend that this is important somehow.
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