As has been reported extensively, the mapping of the Neanderthal
genome has completely turned everything we thought we knew about ancestral
inheritance on its ear. It is all there
and more besides. Add in the recent
discovery that our whole class of naked ape began with a fertile hybrid
offspring of a female primate if not say a chimp, with a boar which then back
bred forever to produce the necessary changes and our present species.
That plausibly took place around 200,000 years ago at least or
even a million years earlier. Whatever
happened, the new strain interbred with every available compatible primate to
produce modern humanity. Throughout all
this females were conserved and the genetic pool broadened and mixed.
That still fails to correct for an obvious adaptation of core
characteristics needed for living on the sea shore. I suspect that our missing other human linage
could turn out to be a coastal primate.
The take home is that human linage has been completely thrown
open with clear differences between huge sections of humanity. Now the fun really begins as we begin to
collect and compare human diversity before we dissolve the separate strains
into the ultimate human hybrid.
Entire Neanderthal genome finally mapped – with
amazing results
The results of an extensive analysis of a
50,000-year-old toe bone belonging to a Neanderthal woman, which was unearthed
in a cave in 2010, have been long awaited. Now, after much anticipation,
the findings
have finally been released by the
journal Nature, and they have not
disappointed. For the first time ever, researchers have completely sequenced
the fossil’s nuclear DNA to the same extent and quality as that of genomes
sequenced from present-day people.
All around the world,
news headlines shout out about incest and inbreeding and other sensationalistic
statements. Sadly, they are missing the most amazing results of all.
This incredible
research has revealed the following:
·
There is now conclusive evidence that
Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years.
Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
·
Ancient human species, including Neanderthals,
Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly
complex family tree.
·
The Denisovans share up to 8 percent of
their genome with a “super achaic” and totally
unknown species that dates back around 1 million years.
·
The results conflict with the theory that
modern humans arose completely from one “out of Africa” migration more than
60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
·
About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of all people with
European ancestry can be traced to Neanderthals.
·
Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher
among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan
DNA.
·
6 percent of the genome of Australian
Aborigines and indigenous Papua New Guineans belong to the Denisovan species.
·
The Han Chinese, native to East Asia, and
the Dai people of southern China are related to both Neanderthals and
Denisovans.
·
Some indigenous people from Brazil, such as
the Karitiana, are not only related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but
they show relatively high genetic contributions from the Denisovans.
·
Only 96 genes responsible for making proteins
in cells are different between modern humans and Neanderthals. Intriguingly, some
of the gene differences involve ones involved in both immune responses and the
development of brain cells in people.
·
Somewhere within these 96 genes may lay the
answer to why Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct.
·
And least consequential of all, the
Neanderthal woman’s parents were related, possibly half-siblings, or an uncle
and niece. As evolutionary biologist Mattias Jakobsson stated, the incest
finding “is more of an anecdote”. The results from one individual cannot be
applied to an entire species, in the same way that the recent discovery of
an incest
family in Australia does not apply to the whole of the human
race.
The study really highlights
that no race of people on earth belongs to one ancestral group, rather we all
have “proportions of ancestral groups," said computational biologist
Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley. What’s more, we can
begin to contemplate the fact that we are all “connected to other species -
extinct smart bipeds”.
So many answers have
been provided from just one study and yet so many questions remain.
-
See more at:
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/entire-neanderthal-genome-finally-mapped-amazing-results-001138#sthash.z59nNT3w.dpuf
Time to go back and re-read L. Sprague de Camp's short story, "The Gnarly Man" (from John W. Campbell's magazine, Unknown, June 1939).
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"Let's have lunch at the Natural History Museum. ... What did you — ah — think of their stuff in the Hall of the Age of Man?"
"Pretty good. There's a little mistake in one of those big wall paintings. The second horn on the wooly rhinoceros ought to slant forward more. I thought about writing them a letter. But you know how it is. They say 'Were you there?' and I say 'Uh-huh' and they say 'Another nut.'"