20% of Neanderthal Genome Survives In Humans 202
vinces99 writes "A substantial fraction of the Neanderthal genome persists in modern human populations. A new analysis (abstract) of 665 people from Europe and East Asia shows that more than 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome survives in the DNA of this contemporary group, whose genetic information is part of the 1,000 Genomes Project."
Another study published today (abstract) finds that Neanderthal genes are present in some parts of our genome that we've found to be important. Some of the genes influence fertility and skin pigment, and others actually increase our susceptibility to diseases like diabetes and lupus. The researchers are now taking these known genetic markers and seeing if they correlate with any other health conditions.
Yes but (Score:4, Funny)
As someone who works in tech support... (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm surprised it's not higher.
I agree based on my neighbor Kevin. He looks exactly like reconstructions of Neanderthals.
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Re:As someone who works in tech support... (Score:4, Interesting)
But who says Neanderthals were dumber though? They managed to survive the cold climate for much longer than we have (which takes considerable more resources and planning than surviving tropic temperatures), and my knowledge is rudimentary, but from what I seen in documentaries, them dying off/merging may simply have been a matter of a warming earth. They were more barrel chested and not able to withstand the warmer climates as well.
Re:As someone who works in tech support... (Score:4, Funny)
" them dying off/merging may simply have been a matter of a warming earth. They were more barrel chested and not able to withstand the warmer climates as well."
Or they were 80% more tasty.
Time to repost (someone else's) old comment (Score:2, Funny)
From God's Roadmap:
Beta
Release version: Homo neanderthalensis
Build name: Adam
Release date: 4,569,770,000 years after cooling
Deprecated: 4,569,971,000 years after cooling
Stable
Release version: Homo sapiens
Build name: Eve
Release date: 4,569,800,000 years after cooling
Deprecated:
[Sigh] Still deciding. I mean, the codebase is starting to look a bit creaky in a few places, and they're starting to tinker with it themselves (they think it's open source - hah!). Inquisitive little so-and-so's can't leave well enoug
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Remember their brains were the same size, if not a little bigger, than ours. And we know they also had the genes that give us the ability to communicate complex information verbally. So no, I do not think we can say for sure that they were dumber -- not unless we were able to say clone a pure neanderthal and then talk to them to see how smart or dumb they really were.
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Since a low-land Gorilla named Coco taught American Sign Language scored 95 on a standardized human IQ test, I would expect most Neanderthals to score in the 95-105 range like any other normal Human.
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From one study of quite awhile back, one reason for Neanderthals dying out was that the heads of Cro-Magnon babies were shaped differently, meaning that Neanderthal mothers with Cro-Magnon fathers tended to die in childbirth, while the reverse wasn't true. There have also been some studies that suggested that their shoulders weren't as well adapted to throwing, so they needed to get close-in with spears, which was more dangerous.
I can't recall any studies that found that they were stupider than Cro-Magnons
Or you could have drawn a better conclusion by rea (Score:2)
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"Resources and planning" is not the only way to survive the cold. While there is a disagreement with Allen's rule (surface area exposed decreases in colder climates), the generally accepted idea is that physically they were better adapted for cold.
There may have been social behaviors that account for temperature dependent survival, which is attributable to being fucking cold rather than being smart.
And the coup de grace. If they died off because of a warming earth, they were not smart enough to adapt to w
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Well, at the end of the ice age, it was getting warmer. But the Neanderthals simply denied that it got warmer, and therefore claimed that expensive adapting would not be necessary. After all, as long as they could think they had hunted mammoths, so why should they now invest time to find other sources of food? All those warnings about global warming were clearly nonsense. And anyway, last winter was pretty cold, so doesn't that disprove global warming?
When they could not deny any longer that it was getting
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Their tool kit was far more primitive than later humans, and only advanced when new peoples brought skills acquired from elsewhere. They don't seem to have been capable of much, if any, innovation on their own. The most advanced Neanderthal cultures always occur where they had the most opportunities to interact with Cro Magnons. Isolated Neanderthal bands kept the identical cultural level for thousands of years.
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We have homo sapiens that design firmware for avionics systems, and we have homo sapiens who throw spears at metal birds [wikipedia.org]. Same species, the only difference is culture.
Do not be so fast to judge the capabilities of neanderthal DNA based on the trinkets they left behind. The accomplishments of humans is due to language and learning, specifically learning of invention from the brightest 0.001%; we are still the same species as we were thousands of years ago.
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They didn't leave cave paintings or anything that indicates capacity for symbolic reasoning.
"Billy, stop that drawing! Your father and I don't provide a warm comfortable cave for you to live in just so you can scribble all over the walls like a proto-hominid or one of those low-class Egyptian pyramid dwellers. Now clean that off before your father gets home, and go wash your hands for dinner. The brontosaurus steaks are almost ready... I mean 'uggh, food hot, eat now'."
Re:As someone who works in tech support... (Score:4, Interesting)
They didn't leave cave paintings or anything that indicates capacity for symbolic reasoning.
We aren't so sure [bbc.co.uk] about that.
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Party "Animal" (Score:5, Interesting)
For a good long time, anatomically modern humans didn't make cave paintings and jewelry either, at least not often enough to be detected. Nobody knows what triggered the use of art in humans.
The best theory I've heard is it's not that humans became smarter, but rather more social. Neanderthal brains were big if not bigger than ours, so they were potentially pretty smart. However, they may have been relatively anti-social.
The most successful humans were probably those who used trade to get the resources their area lacked. For example, your area may have good arrow-head rocks, but not a lot of prey during the dry season. If you encounter another tribe whose area has a lot of prey but poor rocks, you can trade rocks for meat, and both groups benefit and give birth to more traders instead of making war with neighbors.
Normally mammals battle neighboring groups because they compete with resources, so trade requires a different mentality: socializing with strangers. It may have taken several thousands of years to evolve this tendency. (Slashdotters are still working on it :-)
Neanderthals may just have been slower to take advantage of trade. This is possibly because the human population was greater, magnifying the benefits of trade.
Cave paintings and jewelry may have been an early form of advertising of your goods and services, and serving as social gestures of good will.
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Neanderthal brains were big if not bigger ... so they were potentially pretty smart. However, they may have been relatively anti-social.
Now I know who programmers and engineers descended from.
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Proof that evolution favors success.
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Nobody knows what triggered the use of art in humans. ...
I'm going with beer [slashdot.org]. ;)
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Cave paintings [...] may have been an early form of advertising of your goods and services
Hardly - the caves that were decorated are all deep, deep underground and very hard to get to. I think the art was a plea to the gods to send more animals because, between them, the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had wiped them out, especially the mega-fauna.
Re:Party "Animal" (Score:4, Insightful)
We perhaps are only seeing the art that is in hard-to-get-to caves precisely because it is hard to get to. Most surface art would be wiped out by weather or vandals. Thus, we are probably not seeing an accurate representation of original locations.
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Interesting that all those caves are in our days easy to reach from the surface.
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anatomically modern humans didn't make cave paintings and jewelry either ... especially Spain and south France is full with caves that where painted by Neanderthales.
Neanderthales did cave paintings and crafted jewelry
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Neanderthal brains were big if not bigger than ours, so they were potentially pretty smart. However, they may have been relatively anti-social.
The most successful humans were probably those who used trade to get the resources their area lacked...
Hypothesis: The most successful humans were those that were able to raise an army and slaughter those individualistic free-thinking neanderthals. Evidence: recorded human history.
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I'm surprised it's not higher.
The Neanderthals were not The Flintstones.
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Isn't that about what the market share is for network TV?
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IQs
IQ != intelligence. The very idea that you can measure someone's intelligent with a simple number and simplistic, specific, one-size-fits-all tests is pseudoscience at best.
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IQ != intelligence. The very idea that you can measure someone's intelligent with a simple number and simplistic, specific, one-size-fits-all tests is pseudoscience at best.
We measure virtually everything with a simple number these days. What's your credit score?
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Hoo boy, scientific racism again. (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance an average European has an average IQ of 105 compared to 70 in Africa. Though, the higher IQ is likely due to divergent racial evolution that occured well after the insertion of neanderthal genes...
Or it could be a matter of education, relative stress in childhood, and diet. Or it could be a matter of a cultural upbringing that doesn't value and train people in the types of reasoning favored by IQ tests. I'd like to see a test cataloging our relative abilities to navigate vast terrain, to remember and recite oral histories, to perform pattern recognition based on ability to identify wild plants, or just a simple ability to navigate complex social situations, for example. Or it could be a function of languages, since we already know that languages can affect things like the ability to recognize and categorize colors.
Have you ever read letters from American Civil War soldiers to their families back home? We're not talking a college education demographic by a long shot, but the eloquence and care of language in these letters is often breathtaking. Are we "dumber" than them as a populace for not being able to write like an average farm boy could 150 years ago? Or are we just trained for different uses of our brains.
IQ is a crappy measure of genetic superiority, because it fails to account for environment & upbringing, and it's heavily biased towards one particular culture's most valued intelligence traits.
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Has anybody designed a test that measures intelligence (not necessarily standard IQ tests) in which Africans can beat or at least equal Europeans or Asians in a systematic manner? Navigation, pattern recognition, memory, that you mentioned but not something that measures memorized knowledge, something that uses abstract ideas.
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Q: In a overcast afternoon, as you are returning back to the camp with some tubers and eggs you have gathered, you suddenly come face to face with a hyena. What would you do?
A: Turn around and run.
B. Throw the tubers and eggs at the hyena to scare it away.
C. Find a bark or a stick and hold above your head to appear taller than the hyena.
D. Charge and attack the hyena to scare it away.
Wondering how man
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See, that's not really a test of intelligence, it's a test of knowledge, it's like asking somebody from NY which metro and buses to take to reach Time Square, or even a random point in NY. How you know it doesn't measure intelligence and measures knowledge, if you give the info about hyenas to somebody they will know how the correct answer regardless of their mental capacity (to some extent). So if you tell a guy from NY that
1. hyenas chase animals that run away
2. hyenas are afraid of taller animals
3. hyena
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Math is universal 1 + 1 = 2 in any culture no matter how the numbers look, but indeed math ability is influenced by schooling. However good IQ tests can use numbers in a smarter way, it's not actually a math test, like: what number is out of the place: 1, 2, 4, 7 (that's 2 because it's the only one that has round edges -- so you don't need much math knowledge to get this, you just need to be familiar with the concept of numbers and have flexibility in thinking to switch from one context to another -- which
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Has anybody designed a test that measures intelligence (not necessarily standard IQ tests) in which Africans can beat or at least equal Europeans or Asians in a systematic manner? Navigation, pattern recognition, memory, that you mentioned but not something that measures memorized knowledge, something that uses abstract ideas.
The Chitling test [wikipedia.org] is alleged by some to do it.
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Consider that the race you are calling "White" ranges from pasty white pale skin that could pass for albinoism to much darker the most "Blacks" Hindus, the White/Black doesn't work well either.
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"White" is inappropriate, because the only peoples that I can think of that are actually white are the Scandinavians and the Brits. My heritage is mostly French and German, but I tan darker than my co-irker who is supposedly "black". And then you get into the whole foolishness of "White Hispanic" when the people in question might not have any Spanish (or other European) genetic heritage at all and still be lighter skinned than the average resident of Salamanca.
Re:Hoo boy, scientific racism again. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Isn't it funny how, when it comes to religion or other parts of life, we have to accept what science tells us no matter how unpleasant the consequences are. It is inviolable and can't be argued with because it is objective truth. Denialists are shamed and labeled as low-IQ morons. But, as soon as race enters the issue, suddenly science cannot be right under any circumstances, and we have to ignore the evidence of our lying eyes. Isn't that strange?
The problem is that science governing differences in races (which is a pretty scientifically shaky categorization scheme to begin with considering the relative genetic diversity within races) has long been tainted with conclusions driving the "research." Frankly, most so-called "science" surrounding race is pretty much the opposite of science. We're not closing our eyes to the truth on it, we're just looking beneath the surface.
It's a lot like what you see when people try to wrap a veneer of science aroun
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Have you ever read letters from American Civil War soldiers to their families back home? We're not talking a college education demographic by a long shot, but the eloquence and care of language in these letters is often breathtaking. Are we "dumber" than them as a populace for not being able to write like an average farm boy could 150 years ago?
Yes we are. After 5 generations of cheap oil the population lost the need to plan for hard winters. I'm sure you personally know quite a lot of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck and/or are living on welfare (which by the way is also only possible because of cheap oil). Those people just didn't exist back then because they could not survive the winters.
But don't worry. The oil will become very expensive again soon enough.
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I'm sure you personally know quite a lot of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck and/or are living on welfare (which by the way is also only possible because of cheap oil). Those people just didn't exist back then because they could not survive the winters.
You... pretty much don't know anything about the labor conditions surrounding the industrial revolution, do you? Living paycheck to paycheck is an improvement on what people in the 19th century had to deal with. Try being unable to feed your children, even with them working 60+ hrs a week. Consider that they had debtor's prisons back then. You think these people had better finances than people today? We at least have a minimum wage.
Also, you might want to read up on the effects of poverty and deprivati [washingtonpost.com]
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And the ability to strip down and reassemble an AK-47 whilst blindfolded, as that is sadly the real ruler in Africa.
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Why do you think this would be a useful measure of competence for a weapon with primary characteristics of functioning reliably with little or no maintenance and cleaning?
Re:As someone who works in tech support... (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite the fact that the I in IQ stands for intelligence, the standard IQ test is, by design, a measure of how well a person is likely to do in a tradition western school setting. It isn't, and was never meant to be, a measure of a person's worth as a human being or even ones true intelligence. Changes in environment and upbringing can change a person's chances of doing well in school and thus will also change their measurable IQ. So it is likely that certain ethnic groups score differently on their IQ tests, not because of genes or whatever, but because of their environment. Your genes might say that you should be the smartest person in the world; however if you do not get proper nutrition growing up, have parents that are too busy getting what little food is around on the table to read to you, and your early eduction system sucks, then your IQ is going to suffer and you are not going to seem as smart as you could be. Of course this won't stop racists from pointing to tests scores they don't understand in order to peddle their BS.
military origins... (Score:3)
actually i think it was designed to predict how well someone would do in the military, as the army were the originators of these tests and they used them when recruiting and tasking soldiers.
Re:As someone who works in tech support... (Score:4, Interesting)
Cold Winter Theory? That seems ridiculously simplistic. How about a dry summer theory? If cold winters make people evolve because they need to figure out how to survive the winter, then the exact same argument would apply to people living in the middle of a massive desert. The harsh summers would push them to technology or whatever. Or what about peoples who live near the Arctic Circle -- they should be time travelers by now considering the harshness of their winters.
I think you are confusing technological knowledge with intelligence, and I'm willing to bet that the first appearance of a technology is due much more to some wild confluence of necessity, chance, state of the technology available prior, and resources to put it into practice. Once discovered, it spreads the easy way, via communication. But for people to pat themselves on the back and call themselves "more evolved" because they live in a place where some clever person was born, saw a need, a solution, and had the resources to make it work -- well, that could happen almost anywhere. You just won the tech lottery -- that doesn't make you evolved, it makes you lucky.
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Let us assume for the moment that intelligence is a single thing that can be precisely described by a single number.
Now imagine nobody has invented a way of measuring that number yet, so you set out to create an IQ test. You put together a number of tests and tasks, and assign various weights to each question and score. You administer the test to a bunch of people and the results seem reasonable.
Here's the question: how do you know you are actually measuring intelligence, and not something else that appr
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Alfred Binet, when faced with this problem, validated his test by correlating it with school achievement.
In fact the only thing Binet was interested in was deciding what types of classes children should be put in. He specifically said that it wasn't a test of the various and numerous types of intelligence, and that it shouldn't be taken as such. It became perverted when some Americans in the eugenics movement latched onto it. Nowadays psychologists who seriously study intelligence laugh at the idea that the standard IQ tests are a serious measure of intelligence. You may have also heard that the eugenics movem
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But unfortunately, the general public seems to have latched onto the idea that IQ = intelligence.
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This may be a surprise but the racial groups, such as Europeans and East asians, that carry the Neanderthal fragments, have much higher average IQs than African populations where they are not present. For instance an average European has an average IQ of 105 compared to 70 in Africa. Though, the higher IQ is likely due to divergent racial evolution that occured well after the insertion of neanderthal genes, particularly the cold winters theory, that the groups that left africa had to evolve rapidly larger, more advanced brain capacity to cope with the more difficult, complex survival challenges of cold weather environments, such as the long term planning for winter and the skills needed for making of the clothes needed to survive the cold. The cold weather environment of the north provided the challenges that pushed evolution of specific racial groups to a higher level and explains much of the IQ differences between racial groups.
We know nutrition, culture, and education have huge effects on IQ, and these all factors covary by race both between countries and within countries.
If you look at charts of countries by IQ [photius.com] you see huge variations across regions with a similar ethnic profile.
We know non-genetic factors are clearly playing a huge role in these countries, could genetics play a role as well? Sure, but what's our evidence? We already know that IQ varies heavily according to non-ethnic factors within ethnically contiguous regions
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Please read up on the origin of IQ tests [wikipedia.org]. To the extent they are calibrated to anything apart from other IQ tests, they are calibrated against academic performance. Because they were developed originally by British and French scientists, they are calibrated against specifically European standards of academic performance.
There is no objective, unambiguously defined, quantifiable quality of "intelligence" that IQ tests can be said to measure. It is an entirely subjective test with no real scientific basis. In
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Whether you want to call capacity to function within an advanced society "intelligence", or by some other name, the fact is you are merely engaging in semantic hair-splitting.
It's not semantic hair-splitting at all. Many people now have the wrong idea of intelligence thanks to the pseudoscience that is IQ.
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As long as _your_ IQ is over 55 all is fine, no worries with the right drugs you will catch up with those who only have 70 ...
(* facepalm *)
Trying to offset... (Score:3)
I may be 20% neanderthal, but I'm statistically 0.5% Genghis Khan...
Not found in "humans" in general (Score:5, Informative)
These genes do not exist in humanity in general, only specific racial groups. They are completely absent from African populations. Similar to milk digestion. Being able to digest milk in adulthood is a feature found almost only in European race populations, because it is allowed by a genetic mutation that occured in these populations 10,000 years ago. Most other racial groups are lactose intolerant after early childhood. Milk digestion in adulthood is certainly a huge advantage and became much favored with cattle domestication in Europe.
The insertion of neanderthal genes happened around 30,000 years ago immediately after early humans left africa, after that there were 30,000 years of divergent evolution and branching that gave us the geographically distinct racial groups.
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This map distribution show African milk tolerant populations:
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/infographic-day-where-people-can-digest-milk
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Several African peoples are traditionally big herders, and rely heavily on dairy for their diets. Same with many in India. IIRC the current theory is that the lactose tolerance mutation occurred (and thrived) independently in several different places.
Re:Not found in "humans" in general (Score:5, Informative)
Lactose intolerance is complex. The Tuareg of Saharan Africa have lower lactose intolerance rates than Finnish people, for instance. It mostly has to do with whether a group has spent a long time as nomadic herders or not, and adult persistence of lactase activity appears to be caused by several different mutations, that arose spontaneously. http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthr... [zetaboards.com] has a nice list of adult lactase activity in different ethnic groups.
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Why so low a commonality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Neanderthals are barely a separate species.
They're homo neanderthalensis, while modern man is homo sapiens sapiens. The immediate predecessor to modern humans is homo sapiens idaltu, which is minutely different than us. While a simple majority of paleontologists classify Neanderthals as a separate species, there's a significant minority that advocate them as merely another subspecies (home sapiens neanderthalensis) being more correct.
Given that the ENTIRE Neanderthal genome differs from ours by 0.15% or less (we're about 2% different than our closest modern primate relative), I'm very surprised that the Homo-specific genome part is only 20% in common between Neanderthal and Modern Human. Particularly since it's now commonly accepted that they interbred with modern humans.
I think the 20% commonality (if it bears out) probably reinforces the "separate species" theory more than the "distinct subspecies" theory of the Homo genus family tree.
-Erik
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Yup, given that I've read elsewhere that we share about 90% of our genome with fricking cows - all that data for building animal cells, and vertebras, and hearts, and livers, and kidneys, and mammary glands, and hair, and eyes, and nerves, and skin, etc..., having only 20% of the Neanderthal genome in common with us is setting off my bullshit alarm big time.
Human-specific part is 20% common... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think they're referring to the section of our DNA which is specific to the Homo genus.
That is, DNA for the Homo genus is probably about 99.5% or more in common, across all species of Homo. You can tell where the Homo DNA starts by comparing it to other members of the subfamily Homininae, and looking for differences.
So, in the Homo-specific portions of our DNA, TFA is claiming that 20% or so is common to modern humans and Neanderthals. That still seems low, given the interbreeding of Neanderthal and M
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and raise you a fan :)
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Neanderthals are barely a separate species.
They're homo neanderthalensis, while modern man is homo sapiens sapiens.
Umm...you do realize don't you that you can't prove anything just by spouting taxonomy at people? The people who consider them a separate species consider them "Homo neanderthalensis", while those who don't consider them "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis". Its right there in only the second paragraph of their wikipedia page. [wikipedia.org]
In a large part this is an argument over those two sets of names, so you can't resolve anything by just stating one like its some kind of immutable fact of the universe.
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Giving credit where credit is due: http://science.slashdot.org/co... [slashdot.org]
As someone with an ASD (Score:2)
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I've always found the neanderthal theory of autism interesting.
Never heard of it. Do you have more info?
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Black and white (Score:3)
What I find interesting is the only group that doesn't have Neanderthal genes are Africans. It almost sounds like Caucasians got their light skin and ability to handle the cold from Neanderthals and are hybrids while Africans are the only pure humans. Ironic.
Re:Black and white (Score:4, Interesting)
Evidence shows that homo erectus left Africa and then evolved into homo neanderthal. Later early modern humans followed the path of their ancestors and once again migrated out of Africa. It seems that when they met what had evolved from homo erectus -- well let's just say that when the cave is a rockin you shouldn't go a knockin. So it isn't surprising that modern Africans do not have many Neanderthal genes because it doesn't look like they ever migrated back into Africa.
Of course one definition of two groups being in the same species is if they can mate and have fertile offspring. Since we know early modern humans and neanderthals mated and had fertile offspring you could make a good argument that us, early modern humans, homo neanderthal, and homo erectus were/are all the same species.
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We don't know how fertile their offspring were. There have been cases of Mules getting pregnant (only by male donkey) though very rare and there are other hybrids where depending on the sex of parents the young hybrids are more or less fertile. Also to consider is how vigorous the F2 (second generation) offspring is, sometimes breeding happens but all the offspring are very weak. In a human society during plentiful times those offspring may still survive to adulthood.
There's also differences in what is foun
At least 20% (Score:4, Funny)
In fact, 20% survive in Arnold Schwarzenegger alone. Add the National Football League, WWE Wrestling, and the Texas State Board of Education, and you've probably got well above 90%.
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Moot point (Score:2)
We all descended from aliens [wordpress.com] anyway.
From the summary it sounds like nonsense (Score:2)
Considering that humans and chimps have over 95% identical genes, and the same is true for humans and gorillas and chims and gorillas I would assume neanderthals and modern humans have also about 95% - 99% common genes.
Where does this stupid 20% come from?
Hmmm (Score:2)
Re:"fertility skin pigment"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also, 20% is a lot, so we might as well call it human DNA. We own it now, its shapes us.
Re:"fertility skin pigment"? (Score:5, Informative)
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Aside from Neanderthals and Denisovians, which we know about, at least one more group of genes in Central Asian peoples comes from an "unknown" hominid for which we have no genetic samples. I'll skip the obvious joke about Homo Erectus.
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We share 40% of our DNA with grass.
Re:"fertility skin pigment"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely. Evolution is most meaningfully measured in generations, not years. Those species that have averaged a more rapid average reproductive cycle since their ancestors parted ways with ours will have undergone more evolutionary iterations than us. Mice are in the lead pack among mammals. And bacteria leave even mice in the dust, even before you factor in the fact that for them sex is more like performing limited genetic engineering on themselves, allowing useful mutations to spread through the population without any reproduction occurring. Granted they also lack the chaotic genetic roulette of sexual reproduction that the "higher" organisms benefit from, so their average evolution/generation is probably somewhat different than ours.
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Primitive in the genetic sense means that it contains lots of DNA that's been around for a very long time, rather than DNA which has come into existence more recently.
Selection pressure is not uniform across all life forms, therefore, there can be more or less evolving going on at different times, locations, species, etc.
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Evolution doesn't have a goal, it is a drift towards survivability and therefore reproduction in the current status quo.
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You may be interested to know that pale skin genes appeared in the European genome only as recently as 6000-12000 years ago [sciencemag.org]. Or maybe not, as it seems you do not want your opinions messed with by fact.
Interestingly, as Homo sapiens appeared in Europe 40 000 years ago or longer, the thinking is that pale skin should have evolved much sooner to enable vitamin D synthesis from the lower UV levels found there.
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Somebody mod up. This explanation makes much more sense than the bullshit racist competition of euro-centrists and afro-centrists we see so much of in this debate.Quantitative difference != qualitative difference.
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And thank you for following Skitt's Law.
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2.5% according to the Genographic Project.
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And 2.3% Denisovan
Actually neanderthals had larger brains. (Score:2)
Neanderthals were most probably smarter. The theory is that they lived in small groups while our migrating ancestors lived in packs/tribes in larger numbers and until there was proof many people thought that they died off and were probably overrun. It was controversial to claim they bred until there was proof (but it's rather obvious if you think about it, people will screw anything - there is no way they wouldn't; no religion to stop them.)
India has a lot of poor uneducated people. If you lived and grew u