Question, and I’m hoping to get input from our posters who are really knowledgeable in the subject: Just how significant is this latest data? Is it likely to stick, or is it just the latest volley in the ping-pong match? The geneticists seem to indicate that this study was extremely thorough, but one has to wonder what alternate explanations there might be.
For the record, I’m quite happy to be part Neanderthal. I had a hard time believing that the two populations were unable and unwilling to interbreed successfully.
Too bad news like this doesn’t have a wide enough audience. GEICO could have and ad with some copy writer apologizing to his “cousin” about all the Caveman jokes.
It’s amazing that more people care about the Kardashians than about this. I want to know the answer to the question too. As an enthusiast of prehistoric anthropology I was rather surprised by this news; I wouldn’t have bet on it.
It seems that it’s going to stick to me. For one thing, the genes we share are only found in populations outside Africa, which can only be explained by interbreeding after a group of Homo sapiens had moved out from there.
As someone commented elsewhere on the interwebs: "this definitely applies to football fans ".
I wonder what this will do to our sense of what the Identical Ancestor Point is for H. sapiens. If the last Neanderthals died out ~25k years ago, it can’t be earlier than that, so good-bye 5-15k years ago as the time period.
Gee, I got roundly trounced here a couple years ago when I stated that I was certain that we had neanderthal genes in our cro-magnon woodpile. I know at least one guy who you could stand next to a skeleton in a museum and people would think he was a clean shaven modern dressed display unit :rolleyes: Same brow ridge, same short leg/long arm/long torso, same heavy musculature. Back in college a bunch of us used to call him Og because of the neanderthal look he had going on. And yes, he could play the Geico caveman with minimal makeup.
I think that as our knowledge of population genetics improves, we’ll discover that the species concept is naturally very fuzzy.
The debate won’t be settled until we have more information on interspecies gene transfers in general. Perhaps the 1-4% Neanderthal contribution to modern non-Africans is below the typical crossover for apes (or primates, or mammals, …). Then the separate species label might be justifiably. Or, perhaps it is much higher than usual and Neanderthals were a very distinct race of H. sapiens.
I’m eager to see how taxonomy evolves as we get more and more genetics information.
They say that you couldn’t tell a neanderthal in a suit passing you by from a regular person in a suit passing you by, so I am inclined to think there was at least one neanderthal hottie.
