Research Show That Neanderthals Were NOT a Sub-Species of Modern humans

Researchers have identified new evidence supporting the growing belief that Neanderthals were a distinct species separate from modern humans (Homo sapiens), and not a subspecies of modern humans.  Neanderthals' extinction was likely due to competition from modern humans.  

Go Here   to read the absolutely fascinating article from the Ancient Origins online magazine.

Interbreeding in Early Humans- Much More Widespread Than Previously Thought

DNA found in ancient bones from Spain  suggest that interbreeding between human species in Ice Age Europe was more widespread than suspected.

Geneticists at the Max Planck Institute  in Germany extracted  human DNA,  more than 300,000 years old, from  bones found at the bottom of a cave shaft  in northern Spain, where remains of 28 early humans that belong to an unknown species have been discovered.  

The bones suggest that these fore-runners to modern man likely  looked like stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals. But their genetic samples showed that  maternal DNA, drawn from cell mitochondria, was different than that of Neanderthals and also unlike that of more modern humans. It was most closely related to a little known species called the Denisovans, who were unknown  until 2010 when the dna was isolated from samples from a young female.   Those remains were 40,000 years old which indicates Neanderthals, anatomically modern humans and Denisovans coexisted at that time. 

With the discovery that Neanderthal DNA and the newly discovered material, geneticist Michael Hammer said “This tells us something interesting about how our species evolved. It may be that interbreeding was a common process in all of human evolution. ”

Read complete Wall Street Journal article HERE

Neanderthals: The Great Teacher

How many of you often feel that there was a lot more to the Neanderthal / Cro-Magnon interplay?  

Common knowledge has the two races co-existing for a period of time with the Neanderthal "vanishing" in the end.  Well now it is fairly well accepted that Neanderthal did not so much vanish as integrated to make modern Homo-sapiens what the are today. 

Now it appears that Neanderthal had a lot more to offer early man than genetic material.  Mounting evidence has shown that Neanderthal showed early humans how to construct sophisticated bone tools.  

Now this is not the first time that cultural traditions and others have been believed to have originated with Neanderthal to then influence Homo-Sapiens.  The tradition of burying the dead is one dramatic example.  But in general, according to the posting in New Scientist,   most researchers think that the bulk of  cultural exchange passed the other way, from humans to Neanderthals.    

From the article:

• "It is just about possible, says Fred Coolidge at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, that over tens of thousands of years Neanderthals thought up a way of doing one thing – making these tools – that humans hadn't thought of before,"

Check out the NewScientist article HERE

No Harvard Cave Baby.....Bad Translation.

I must have missed this one, but this is what the the online magazine Britian's Daily Mail ran recently:

• “Wanted: ‘Adventurous Neanderthal man — Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby

Geneticist George Church  the Harvard scientist in the middle of this mess says that the story was completely untrue!    Church said that the real story centers around an article he was interviewed for in the German magazine Der Spiegel in which he said that:

• such a cloning might theoretically be possible someday  

Whoever wrote the article for Britain's Daily Mail mis-translated the article and came to the conclusion that Church was actively looking for a woman to host a child from the DNA scrapings of Neanderthal bones.  

Church goes on to say that he wasn't even involved in the gene sequencing!  In fact, he goes on to say, his line of research is in how to use DNA to improve health, produce synthetic fuels, and other products, not cloning ancient humans!

Full Boston Herald article

Photo George M. Church

Confirmed? Early humans and Neanderthals interbred!

Somebody got some spainin to do! But according to a recent IO9 article:

• Part of the X chromosome found in people from outside Africa originally comes from our Neanderthal cousins.

This reversal of positions from Neanderthals and more "modern" homo-sapiens at the time come from research done at the Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal.

Neanderthals left Africa around 400,000 to 800,000 years ago and went extinct 30,000 years ago. Homo-Sapiens left Africa 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. This would give the two races at least 20 thousand years of overlap.

Now anyone reading so far is thinking....that doesn't prove anything or if anything such a short period is more than likely to lean towards no intermingling at all. But Dr LaBuda has additional evidence to bolster his case.

Again from the article:

• (During the last decade LaBuda) and his team had identified a piece of DNA in the human X chromosome that seemed out of place (possibly) from a non-human source.

Of course their suspicions were confirmed with the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010. 6,000 chromosomes were examined from donors of all major and minor population densities. All with the exception of populations from sub-Saharan Africa, had corresponding parts of the Neanderthal sequenced DNA, even widely separated populations in places like Australia.

IO9 article
This article links to Molecular Biology and Evolution which has even more fascinating information.

Where'd the Neanderthals go? Ask Your Great Great Ever so Great Granny

Yep NewScientist online mag writes that the Neanderthal genome does in fact reveal interbreeding with our early human ancestors. Even more startling is that scientists are now saying that the two species are so closely related as to be grouped as a single species!

The common ancestor of both groups migrated out of Africa about 500,000 years ago where as our more closely related ancestors remained in Africa to about 100,000 years ago when they also began spreading out. This second expansion might have put pressure on the already exsisting Neanderthal groups which died out about 28,000 years ago.

But in recent DNA sequencing project using material from Neanderthals reveals

• Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome.....

This recombining of the DNA must have taken place about 45,000 years ago because all non African populations have the same amount of material in their genomes.

From the article:

• Archaeological evidence suggests that humans and Neanderthals overlapped for about 10,000 years in Europe and some fossils have even been interpreted as Neanderthal-human hybrids

read complete Newscientist article here> and Boing boing here

New Study looks at CroMag + Neander for Modern HomoSap

Ever in search of the kink, IO9 spots an article in Plos One that deals with a new Italian study which revisits the possibility that in some part modern homo-sapiens are the result of blended genetic material from Neanderthal and Cro-magnon or more accurately the early ancestors of Homo-sapiens.

A group of Italian researchers published a new study comparing the DNA from early human bones from about 28,000 years ago with DNA Neanderthal bones.

What is very interesting about the study and ultimately the findings centers on the early HS bones. These bones were discovered very recently and as such are not as likely as earlier samples to be contaminated by genetic material from modern humans handling them.

The researchers sequenced DNA from these bones, testing to see if there was significant overlap with Neanderthal DNA, which would indicate that homo sapiens' DNA had been changed by interbreeding with Neanderthals. But tests of the fossilized DNA revealed no matches. The early HS material looks essentially identical to modern humans while looking significantly different from Neanderthal DNA.


Plos One via IO9