'Neanderthals Among Us' review
historytoday.com41 points by pepys a day ago
41 points by pepys a day ago
There has to be a living person that is the very most Neanderthal, it would be cool if the consumer DNA companies consensually released that. It would satiate my curiosity and probably lead to lucrative influencer money for the person revealed
There is a wiki.
"While 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives today, most people only carry about a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA, and most Neanderthal-derived DNA is non-coding. Neanderthals maintained a low genetic diversity and suffered from inbreeding depression; consequently most Neanderthal genes were probably selected out of the gene pool...
"Various estimates exist for the proportion, such as 1–4% or 3.4–7.9% in modern Eurasians, or 1.8–2.4% in modern Europeans and 2.3–2.6% in modern East Asians."
23andMe states the maximum Neanderthal variant copies they've seen in https://permalinks.23andme.com/pdf/23-05_neanderthal_ancestr...
They already got hunted down once, not sure I'd pop my squared jaw out of the hole for this era
Oh I would totally go on the reality TV show My Neanderthal Life if it was me.
> for example the 2026 discovery that interbreeding was predominantly between Neanderthal males and human females, and not between Neanderthal females and human males.
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aea6774
Isn't it believed to be (at least partially) caused by maternofetal Rh incompatibility that was likely to happen with Neanderthal mother and human father?
There is a paper that was describing, that Neanderthals had their mtdna replaced by something mtdna that was more related to Homo Sapiens starting about 400 000 years ago and fully replaced? 200 000 years ago, so matrilineally Neanderthals were close to Homo Sapiens already. And that question should have not been raised nowadays at all. Besides we also have already found remains of 50% and 25% hybrids, so doesn't seem to be a problem of interbreeding with other humans - just like our ancestors had not issues interbreed with Denisovans as well, with whom we had slightly larger DNA differences than with Neanderthals.
Bigger issue seems to be that Neanderthal inbreeding between themselves as they were living without access to other pools of dna of humans and that most probably was a cause why they did not bounce back.
Rh incompatibility results in limited ability to crossbreed, not complete inability. It usually doesn't affect the first child, only subsequent ones.
Lol. Bride kidnapping is still a thing. In my culture it’s not a thing anymore, but it’s still being acted out as part of wedding customs. There’s also a separate word for “people who go after the people who stole the girl”.
I find it more likely the admixture is from girls our ancestors went to take back who were already pregnant.
> In the 1990s hair-dragging rape scenes in the Clan of the Cave Bear novels (20 million copies sold by 1990) caused the books to be banned from American public libraries.
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
But it's been so long ago, I may misremember.
Never read the books but I do remember my grandmother who owned them and my mother both telling me kids couldn’t read them while giving me full access to dragon riders of pern
The Neanderthal extinction always made me think that erasure of races in our modern times will follow a similar pattern. People think of the Native Americans as getting wiped out by disease/violence over a few years, but their ultimate end (and every other races end) probably will be similar to Neanderthals: slowly getting bred out of existence until finding someone with >2% DNA is a novelty. Same thing will probably happen to any smaller populations as globalization/interbreeding means massive populations like China/India will end up being the majority of the DNA.
Yes but draw an arbitrary line around any group. Call them HNdrathals if you want. Define them at one instaneous snapshot in time as 100% conserved gene corpus. Then watch generation after generation, as some of the HNers (against all odds) interbreed with the surrounding populace. After one hundred generations, should we expect many people to be more than 2% HNdrathal? Yet did the HNdrathals ‘die out’?
Careful, HNers are a population with a history of trauma associated with unclosed parentheses. By raising our cortisol levels you may be lowering our fertility rate by exposing us to them.
Thanks, edited along w/ several other typos (checks glasses prescription) :)
Ok. but ancestral groups are in no way "arbitrary" when it comes to DNA. So what's your point?
They are, a bit, we define quite broadly and there is “fuzz” at the borders of countries.
I lean your way of course, it’s not totally arbitrary, but where we draw a line tends to be a bit arbitrary.
As someone else commented “race” is not a scientific concept; it’s more about vibes
The only DNA genes we have are coming from Middle East contact of Neanderthals with Homo Sapiens. There was no bred out of the extinction event, specific to Neanderthals only, as we are missing also majority of DNA of those early Homo Sapiens.
Races has nothing to do with any of that - Neanderthals themselves seems to had different looks, depending on region they were living and had contacts with other humans - and we all were the same species.
I'm always surprised at the opposite. We have such distinct ethnicities. It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
By DNA there is rarely any non-mixed population of ethnic groups. That applies both to maternal(unless interbreeding is a preference) and paternal lineages, as people are quite mixed, but borders of cultures and beliefs(in various myths - including about their ancestry) is what is holding societies together.
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out. USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
> I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
We are all mixed race.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races. Some more different than others.
"race" is not a concept that's really supported by genetics [1]
[1] https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscien...
With neanderthals it was physical factors. With groups in modern times it’ll probably be cultural factors. Many groups have panda-like reproductive preferences.
Yes, unless some natural or anthropogenic disaster makes it impossible to visit other continents.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
Dig into the words Homo neanderthalensis and you get “the man from the valley of the new man” - a wonderfully ironic name for an extinct human.
I thought this was a new twist on the popular online game
Sahlins is one of the GOATS of modern anthropology
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
Is there a replacement now for 23andMe?
When the mammoth is sus.
[flagged]
Obvious rage bait aside, this is exactly what the author of the book presented in the article cautions against:
> The Neanderthal genome, he warns, remains ‘something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human’.
Maybe read an article before commenting on it.