Neanderthals may have interbred with humans

Nature News ^ | 4-20-10 | Rex Dalton

[SunkenCiv]

:’D

[Steve Van Doorn]

WHY!!!?

[wendy1946]

Not really surprising...

Basically, just plain wrong.

Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets. Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth. But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant....

The curious total lack of evidence of crossbreeding was finally explained by nenaderthal DNA studies in the late 90s. Neanderthal DNA is about halfway between ours and that of an ape; we could no more interbreed with neanderthals than we could with goats or horses. That also eliminated any possibility of our being descended from any hominid since to be descended from something, at some point, you have to be able to interbreed with the something. This new "finding" is almost certainly wishful thinking driven by this realization, and the hope of keeping the dying ideological doctrine of evolution alive for another year or two.

[ZULU]

Great article. It would make sense.

[SunkenCiv]

Neanderthal DNA is about halfway between ours and that of an ape; we could no more interbreed with neanderthals than we could with goats or horses.

You've brought this up again, it's still just an idiotic lie. There are NO scientists who claim it, there were NO scientists who claimed it at the time, and the ONLY place it has ever appeared was a tabloid newspaper in INDIA.

[Pharmboy]

Where oh where did you get this tripe? By the time Neanderthals came about, they were about 6 million years away from our common ancestor with chimps and quite close to us in time. Just silly stuff...

[Dustbunny]

Took them long enough to come to this conclusion. Guess they never read ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’.

[wendy1946]

I’ve posted sources for this before and they’re still good. The ONLY part of the thing which isn’t part of standard science just yet is the obvious implication of the facts; the claim that Neanderthal DNA is halfway between ours and a chimpanzees is well known and even standard sources like PLOS Biology claim that the Neanderthal made no discernable contribution to the genome of modern man.

[AuntB]

“Neanderthals may have interbred with humans”

I have absolutely no doubt of that. I’ve known a few...they’ll fool ya by walking upright.

[SunkenCiv]

the claim that Neanderthal DNA is halfway between ours and a chimpanzees is well known

If so, it is merely a well known lie.

[wendy1946]

http://www.expressindia.com/news/fe/daily/19970712/19355423.html

He said his team ran four separate tests for authenticity - checking whether other amino acids had survived, making sure the DNA sequences they found did not exist in modern humans, making sure the DNA could be replicated in their own lab and then getting other labs to duplicate their results. Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed the Neanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee.

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/video/On_Trial.html

Neandertals are almost exactly halfway between the chimpanzee and modern humans

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals

The Neanderthal sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA. Researchers compared the Neanderthal to modern human and chimpanzee sequences. Most human sequences differ from each other by on average 8.0 substitutions, while the human and chimpanzee sequences differ by about 55.0 substitutions. The Neanderthal and modern human sequences differed by approximately 27.2 substitutions.

I mean, try dividing 55 by 27.2 on your own calculator or sliderule and see what you come up with. And then stop the whining and stop calling people liars for proving you wrong when you're wrong.

[wendy1946]

I mean, take a hard look. The thing might walk upright, but it has an ape's short and rounded torso and the arms and hands are more like what you'd expect with an ape and, again, that's the best and brightest of the hominids, every other one of them is much further from us. The idea of claiming that both we and the neanderthal are descended from some still more remote ancestor when it is acknowledged that we could not be descended from the neanderthal because of the huge genetic gap is ludicrous.

[SunkenCiv]

The Neanderthal sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA. Researchers compared the Neanderthal to modern human and chimpanzee sequences. Most human sequences differ from each other by on average 8.0 substitutions, while the human and chimpanzee sequences differ by about 55.0 substitutions. The Neanderthal and modern human sequences differed by approximately 27.2 substitutions.

I mean, try dividing 55 by 27.2 on your own calculator or sliderule and see what you come up with. And then stop the whining and stop calling people liars for proving you wrong when you're wrong.

It is a ridiculous lie, period.

There's NOTHING in that quote regarding WHICH 55 substitutions, iow, you're claiming that there are 27.8 substitutions between chimp and Neandertal, and 27.2 substitutions between Neandertal and a living human, but that isn't correct, and it's ignorant or just plain dishonest to say that it does mean that.

The differences between chimps and ALL human samples are the same substitutions -- that's a comparison between living chimp DNA samples and human DNA from living and non-living forms.

In entirely different places, and relying on surviving samples from non-living humans (iow, a very small snapshot from what was probably a low-density population, and by that very characteristic, more diverse than living groups, just as is found in places like Africa today), humans and Neandertal differ -- a tiny number of known substitutions out of an otherwise identical collection of millions of base pairs.

[wendy1946]

Apart from the DNA studies, there is the problem that in situations in which you'd expect interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals to be very common, there is zero evidence of it.

From James Shreeve's "Neanderthal Peace", Discover Magazine, 1996:

Whatever the tools suggest, the skeletons of moderns and Neanderthals look different, and the pattern of their differences is too consistent to dismiss. As anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico has shown, those skeletal differences clearly reflect two distinct patterns of behavior, however alike the archeological leavings may be. Furthermore, the two physical types do not follow one from the other, nor do they meet in a fleeting moment before one triumphs and the other fades. They just keep on going, side by side but never mingling. In his behavioral approach to bones, Trinkaus purposely disregards the features that might best discriminate Neanderthals and moderns from each other genetically. By definition, these traits are poor indicators of the effects of life-style on bone, since their shape and size are decided by heredity, not by use. But there is one profoundly important aspect of human life where behavior and heredity converge: the act that allows human lineages to continue in the first place.

Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.

Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.

But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.

Of course, to interbreed, you first have to meet. Some researchers have contended that the coexistence on the slopes of Mount Carmel for tens of thousands of years is merely an illusion created by the poor archeological record. If moderns and Neanderthals were physically isolated from each other, then there is nothing mysterious about their failure to interbreed. The most obvious form of isolation is geographic. But imagine an isolation in time as well. The climate of the Levant fluctuated throughout the Middle Paleolithic--now warm and dry, now cold and wet. Perhaps modern humans migrated up into the region from Africa during the warm periods, when the climate was better suited to their lighter, taller, warm-adapted physiques. Neanderthals, on the other hand, might have arrived in the Levant only when advancing glaciers cooled their European range more than even their cold-adapted physiques could stand. Then the two did not so much cohabit as time-share the same pocket of landscape between their separate continental ranges.

While the solution is intriguing, there are problems with it. Hominids are remarkably adaptable creatures. Even the ancient Homo erectus- -who lacked the large brain, hafted spear points, and other cultural accoutrements of its descendants--managed to thrive in a range of regions and under diverse climatic conditions. And while hominids adapt quickly, glaciers move very, very slowly, coming and going. Even if one or the other kind of human gained sole possession of the Levant during climatic extremes, what about all those millennia that were neither the hottest nor the coldest? There must have been long stretches of time--perhaps enduring as long as the whole of recorded human history--when the Levant climate was perfectly suited to both Neanderthals and modern humans. What part do these in-between periods play in the time-sharing scenario? It doesn’t make sense that one human population should politely vacate Mount Carmel just before the other moved in.

If these humans were isolated in neither space nor time but were truly contemporaneous, then how on earth did they fail to mate? Only one solution to the mystery is left. Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed in the Levant because they could not....

[wendy1946]

Aside from that, the only "lie" in this picture is the claim that humans and hominids could have had a "common ancestor(TM)". Genetic studies show the Neanderthal too far removed for us to be descended from him via any process resembling evolution and any "common ancestor(TM)" for both us and Neanderthals would have to be further removed THAN the Neanderthal.

How stupid is that? How bright do you need to be to figure that one out?? If we can't be descended from the Neanderthal because he's too far removed, how the **** are we gonna be descended from Heidelbergensis which was vastly FURTHER removed??

This is the claim now coming from the evolosers and it's idiotic. There is no possible way that we are related to hominids at all, in any way, shape, or manner, other than for the remote possibility that we might represent some genentic engineering step from the Neanderthal and the most likely answer is that both we and the Neanderthal represent similar design processes.

[SunkenCiv]

There are no such genetic studies! You will of course continue to make yourself look foolish by regurgitating that claim, including in the recent topics regarding the very recent (and more thorough) studies showing that modern humans carry known Neandertal genes.

But you’ve shifted off your baseless original claim — that Neandertal is halfway between a chimp and living humans — perhaps once again it just barely dawned on you that having a genome match better than 99% between a very small sample (pretty much one individual) from thousands of years ago and living humans, shows that Neandertal lives on in our genes.

[SunkenCiv]

Shreeve (writing that piece fourteen years ago) continued to harp on the foolish 19th century bias, despite knowing this, which is precisely the refutation of his journalist-level foregone conclusion:

The Neandertal Enigma
by James Shreeve
in local libraries

Frayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]

[wendy1946]

The basic bottom line is that the DNA studies forbid our having descended from hominids via any process resembling evolution and this correlates with both the study which Shreve published in Discover as I mentioned and with Gunnar Heinsohn's notes on the stratigraphies and the erroneous manner in which they have been heretofore interpreted. There simply isn't time for us to have evolved from hominids; the changeover from Neanderthals to humans according to a more realistic interpretation of stratigraphies would have taken place in one or two generations. That of course is before you even get to the Haldane dilemma from population genetics and the actual amounts of time it would take to evolve your way from a hominid or "ape-like ancestor(TM)" to modern humans all over the world (i.e. quadrillions of years).

The theory of evolution is FUBAR and going on talking about these 500,000 year time frames for "human evolution" is basically ignorant given what we now know.

[SunkenCiv]

The basic bottom line is that the DNA studies forbid our having descended from hominids via any process resembling evolution...

No, the basic bottom line is, you don't know what you're talking about.

At the level of great great great great grandparents, there are 64 names; except for a small number of people (with Down's, or Turner syndrome, etc) each of us (and each of the ancestors) has 46 chromosome pairs, which means that at least 18 of the gggggp's haven't passed on any genes at all.

But they had to be there, or we wouldn't be, and we're still descended from them.

The basic bottom line of the family tree? Simple mathematics done on a calculator or slide rule forbid your having been descended from those 18 people.

[PapaBear3625]

Guilty

Not worse than what you see in bars at closing time, and who still get guys to take them home.