Quote:
Originally Posted by Vettezuki
The latest genetic data (such as it is) suggests quite strongly that our species (homo sapien) was getting it on with Neanderthal. And why not, they didn't have cars or anything. They used to think we pretty much wiped them out. It's looking more like they got absorbed and they are us now.
Of course there are a few details that need to be filled in here and there . . .  |
Actually the DNA studies done do not support cross breeding between homo sapiens and neanderthals. Having said that, the jury is still out:
"On November 16, 2006, Science Daily published an interview that suggested that Neanderthals and ancient humans probably did not interbreed.[citation needed] Edward M. Rubin, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), sequenced a fraction (0.00002) of genomic nuclear DNA (nDNA) from a 38,000-year-old Vindia Neanderthal femur bone. They calculated the common ancestor to be about 353,000 years ago, and a complete separation of the ancestors of the species about 188,000 years ago. Their results show the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals are at least 99.5% identical, but despite this genetic similarity, and despite the two species having coexisted in the same geographic region for thousands of years, Rubin and his team did not find any evidence of any significant crossbreeding between the two. Rubin said, "While unable to definitively conclude that interbreeding between the two species of humans did not occur, analysis of the nuclear DNA from the Neanderthal suggests the low likelihood of it having occurred at any appreciable level."[39]
A main proponent of the interbreeding hypothesis is Erik Trinkaus of Washington University. In a 2006 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Trinkaus and his co-authors report a possibility that Neanderthals and humans did interbreed. The study claims to settle the extinction controversy; according to researchers, the human and neanderthal populations blended together through sexual reproduction. Trinkaus states, "Extinction through absorption is a common phenomenon,"[22] and "From my perspective, the replacement vs. continuity debate that raged through the 1990s is now dead."[40] Trinkaus thinks he sees evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in some fossils like the 24,500-year-old skeleton of a child found in Lagar Velho in Portugal.
Recently, Richard E. Green et al. from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published the full sequence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and suggested that "Neandertals had a long-term effective population size smaller than that of modern humans."[41] While reporting in Nature Journal about the same publication, James Morgan asserted that the mtDNA sequence contained clues that Neanderthals lived in "small and isolated populations, and probably did not interbreed with their human neighbours."[42][43]"
Cool Stuff:
Important new find for evolutionary science - pretty amazing!
