The comments here are of especially low quality for some reason.
Anyways, the article simply says that they found teeths with Neanderthal like roots, but Human like shape. This can possibly be fossil evidence of interbreeding and thus hybrid. They haven't checked the DNA yet, but there's prior art in modern human DNA that show some 2% coming from Neanderthal.
So the difference is we might now have fossil evidence as well as DNA that interbreeding was possible.
There's no proof of any explanation of why Neanderthal and Human would have interbred. Or if that is the single cause of pure bred Neanderthals disappearing. The discovery doesn't even make any claim to it from what I could tell.
Finally, there's a possibility the fossil isn't from a hybrid at all, but from some independently evolved specie or Neanderthal who developed Human like traits on their own. Though that seems less likely since they know the area the fossil comes from was connected to the rest of the continent.
What explanation should there be? Humans and Neanderthals weren’t removed enough to really be different species so it’s likely that Humans and Neanderthals, while very distance cousins, may have considered each other attractive and even the same species (note that they definitely didn’t think about species back them, but you get what I mean) so us theorizing on why they would have interbred doesn’t make much since to be. Like most ancient cultures they probably had tribal fighting with the victor taking the women from the losing tribe.
Neanderthals were humans. Sex with them would maybe have been weird, but certainly not bestiality. I don't understand why you're comparing it with that - please elaborate?
It's a response to "may have considered each other attractive and even the same species". I brought it up to explain that things happen between way more distant species, so those are unnecessary conditions.
I see it as a good argument that we don't need some special evidence to believe early modern humans and Neanderthals would have had sex (though we do need more evidence to understand if they could actually produce viable offspring), since we can look at the sexual behavior of modern humans with much more distant species.
What an ignorant statement. Neanderthals were a Hominid in the genera Homo that co-existed at some point with Homo Sapiens.
Whether or not they were a subspecies of H. Sapiens or a separate species within the genera is an entire field of study. (i.e. Siberian Tiger and Bengal Tiger vs. Siberian Tiger and Lion)
If it were as simple as your claim, this article and the research that is it's subject would not exist.
Most of these groups were probably your ancestors. Some may have contributed more to your genetic makeup than others, this is irrelevant. Choosing to call some human but not others is a poor categorization decision that should be rectified.
No, Humans are specifically and exclusively the species Homo Sapiens. Furthermore, your supposition that "Most of these groups were probably your ancestors" is quite literally what the research described in this article is about, because that is not a known fact, and only one of multiple hypothesis.
The prevailing theory is that your claim here is entirely wrong, and that early humans killed and possibly ate the Neanderthals rather than interbreeding with them.
Step back and think about what you are doing right now. You're commenting about scientific research around an unknown point in anthropological history... making claims that would require you to know that point of history that is not known.
In that taxonomy, Human refers to the species of Homo sapiens. Wikipedia list the classification for it pretty well under the "Scientific classification" header: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
Until very recently, it was presumpted that modern humans (me and you) came exclusively from the Homo Sapiens specie.
> Though I do seem to recall all sorts of hominids being called "early humans" in my elementary and middle school texts
Yes sometimes Human could refer to the genus Homo instead of the species Homo Sapiens. Which is where people will say modern human/early human to disambiguate.
But what is novel is that modern humans might not actually be Homo Sapiens, but hybrids of different species from the genus of Homo, such as Homo Neanderthalensis.
This has been shown in 2010 thorough novel DNA evidence from modern human DNA. And this article just now shows that we found a teeth with hybrid characteristics.
Even more interesting, not every modern human have Homo Neanderthalensis DNA in them.
All of this is new development, and there's still much we don't know.
It's only since 2010 that there's evidence of interbreeding. So I don't know from where you're making all these assumptions.
For a long time it wasn't known if they could interbreed, and it wasn't known if they did, or how common it would be. Now it is seemingly more plausible that they could and they did.
Think about monkeys for example, it's not that common (though I think we're also realizing it might be more common than we first thought) for them to interbreed with other species of monkey.
Monkey species are likely much more different from each other than these Homo branches were though. Including courtship behavior and general lifestyle.
They might have been more similar in the past, but now they're well speciated.
As far as I know, we don't know anything about the "courtship behavior" of Neanderthal or Homo Sapiens circa -50k. And I doubt anyone can compare their "general lifestyle" with certitude. It doesn't mean these claims are wrong, just that they are not based on facts.
They're not unreasonable assumptions. Especially considering that there is evidence of interbreeding between homo sapiens and neanderthals. There's DNA evidence, and now there's fossil evidence. If they're genetically somewhat compatible, it seems likely that it would have happened, and not really a good reason why it wouldn't.
Basically for every discovery of a possible human ancestry, we will need evidence of interbreeding, we can't just assume off course they all interbred. That's not science.
So this evidence is relatively new, in 2010 we found modern humans have about 2% DNA, and now we found a fossil teeth that appears to have hybrid characteristics.
My second issue is with people making assertions like: well off course probably they were tribal and at war with each other and would have a tradition of keeping the females of their enemies. Or off course they would have been attracted physically to each other. Etc.
We can all make up whatever explanation we want to believe in, that does not make it true. We'll similarly need to slowly unravel evidence that points towards those explanations to get an accurate understanding. And I was simply saying this new teeth discovery gives us no insight into this. So it seems we still don't know why they'd have interbred, how common it was, if all occurrence could successfully lead to offspring, when it would have started to happen, etc.
> My second issue is with people making assertions like: well off course probably they were tribal and at war with each other and would have a tradition of keeping the females of their enemies. Or off course they would have been attracted physically to each other. Etc.
I totally agree there. Don't assume too much about circumstances and lifestyles that we don't know about. Although I think that line was mostly a list of speculative examples, and not intended as a definitive explanation.
But given humans, it's not too crazy to assume some of them will have sex. And given that we've known for about 10 years that some humans (Europeans especially, I believe) have some small amount of Neanderthal DNA, clearly they did, and were at least somewhat interfertile.
Curious. I remember a friend's brother, who is a geneticist, lightly rubbing me about being part-Neanderthal when I was barely in university, which was a good 20+ years ago.
(I'm a ginger, he's Mediterranean - joke's on him now we know that a smattering of Neanderthal genes weren't just for us Northern barbarians).
> There's no proof of any explanation of why Neanderthal and Human would have interbred.
Proof? It's everywhere. Nature is mostly highly organized and predictable, with flashes of randomness. Is this not evolution itself? DNA "accidents" that prove useful (or not) and become dominant (or not).
At just 2%, that's within reasonable expectation for random. It could have been higher in certain isolated pockets/communities. Unfortunately, those combinations weren't beneficial or perished for some other random reason (e.g., flash flood), and that evidence is lost in undiscovered fossils.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Please don't make accounts to do that with.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok, interpretations differ, but I don't think the median reader would find sudden, random questioning of another commenter's personal sexuality "perfectly reasonable". I think they'd find it egregious and aggressive.
Also, when we we ban an account, it's usually because of a repeated pattern of behavior, not just one comment. Had it just been one comment, I'd have warned rather than banned.
" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
> Also, when we we ban an account, it's usually because of a repeated pattern of behavior, not just one comment. Had it just been one comment, I'd have warned rather than banned.
Exactly two of said user's posts were deleted (and they seemed quite mild), they did not get any warning. Also interesting how you did not reply to the user themselves.
Meanwhile you have actual toxic people like DanBC, tptacek, and a few others roaming around freely. Subjective and selective enforcement of rules is worse than no enforcement.
Saying "seriously" meant, as a security professional, I have a very legitimate, passionate interest in social psychology - not that I wanted to poke fun at someone.
We're all here to analyze and learn from each other - or....should be.
Not for nothing, Dan, it could also be considered rude in some circles to publicly engage with a third party about a person when being addressed by that person.
Abstract
Thirteen permanent fully erupted teeth were excavated at the Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey in 1910 and 1911. These were all found in the same location, on a ledge behind a hearth in a Mousterian occupation level. They were originally identified as being Neanderthal. A fragment of occipital bone was found in a separate locality in a later season. Recent dating of adjacent sediments gives a probable age of <48 ka. The purpose of this article is to provide an updated description of the morphology of this material and consider its likely taxonomic assignment from comparison with Neanderthal and Homo sapiens samples. One of the original teeth has been lost, and we identify one as nonhominin. At least two adult individuals are represented. Cervix shape and the absence of common Neanderthal traits in several teeth suggest affinities with H. sapiens in both individuals, while crown and root dimensions and root morphology of all the teeth are entirely consistent with a Neanderthal attribution, pointing toward a possible shared Neanderthal and H. sapiens ancestry (the likely date of this material corresponds with the time in which both Neanderthals and H. sapiens were present in Europe). The occipital fragment is stratigraphically more recent and does not exhibit any diagnostic Neanderthal features.
Paywalled. Currently no preprint on google scholar[1], nor result on sci-hub. Not on project[2] or Stringer pages. Skinner(Kent) repository copy is access restricted.
"Absorbed" does a lot of work, suggesting that there was not a lot of violence, since the DNA is intermingled.
But war in the ancient times, would result in DNA intermingling. The men would be killed, and the women kept alive.
An example from the Bible:
Dueteronomy 20:12-15
12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
Regarding female captives - Deuteronomy 21:10-14
10 When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, 11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails 13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.
This what war and conflict was like in the ancient world, in recorded history. It was likely very similar to this in pre-history when there was conflict between modern humans and Neanderthals. The males would be killed and the women takes as wives/(sex)slaves.
The DNA evidence does nothing to dispute violent conflict between humans and Neanderthals.
To be honest, 'anatomically correct humans' were doing that to one another anyway. To treat Neanderthal like that, was actually to treat them as really human. Just like everybody else.
There's a pretty good documentary on Curiosity Steam called Out of the Cradle that goes over the story of early humans. The path from the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans to modern humans is not a straight line. There were a lot of forms of hominids running around until modern humans pretty much took over the planet, and these hominids were frequently cross breeding with each other. Neanderthals were certainly part of this story. If you're at all interested, I'd recommend Curiosity Stream since it's cheap enough to be worth the subscription even if you only watch a few of the videos.
Also, the excellent Tides of History podcast is doing a series on early humans. The host Patrick Wyman started this cycle in July 2020 and a lot of the material he talks about is based on the latest archaeological evidence and understanding. Very much worth listening to, and it's available on the usual podcasting platforms.
The original title is "La guerre du feu" (The war of fire). The film is enjoyable and generally faithful to the book of Rosny l'aîné.
"La guerre du feu" was written more than a century ago, and the author was more interested in romance and adventure (and selling books) than in scientific accuracy. The film removes or softens the colonialist and dated perspective (tribes of inferior humans, fully domesticating mammoth, fighting for a woman...) and portrays the cooperation between tribes.
Neanderthals were humans. The common generally accepted term that captures the intended contrast from Neanderthals is “anatomically modern humans”. (The article, unlike the headline, gets this right.)
We are looking at very long time periods, the cave La Cotte de St. Brelade had continuous Neanderthal occupation for 250 000 years, the span of recorded history is roughly 5000 years.
So called modern humans and neanderthals shared living space for roughly 2000 years, they were genetically close enough to have viable offspring. Like a donkey and a horse produce a mule that is infertile.
With human neanderthal offspring it is likely the male offspring was infertile but the female was fertile
Most remarkable for me is how long the neanderthal was a stable group and even now they contribute quite a large amount to the human phenotype.
I wouldn't call anything on the likelihood of fertility without genomic analysis. These branches of humanity were similar enough that the offspring could be viable, in fact, sometimes you can find people with more neanderthal residual genomic admixture nowadays too.
Modern biology has moved on from the definition of a species being able to breed functioning offspring, since it's actually pretty fuzzy- e.g. with ring species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
I'm not sure your comment is relevant to the discussion. The concept of species, when it involves sexual reproduction, is pretty straight-forward: mating produces fertile offspring.
Your remark is only relevant when nit-picking corner cases involving asexual reproduction, which I don't expect to be the case in Neanderthal-Human cross-breeding.
It really isn't. In higher mammals the basic property of generating fertile offspring through sexual reproduction is clear-cut and undisputed. The only discussion there is in the species problem is in reaching consensus on a general definition that is common to all taxonomy levels and regardless of type of reproduction.
Hence the species problem being a debate regarding generic traits, and which should count and not count, hoping to form a common definition.
If you haven't read the literature just say so. This is an actual topic of debate between real anthropologists and has been for decades. I think everyone sort of got tired of hashing it out with all the recent tree-rewriting going on, but it's still unresolved.
They still have a valid point in that we don’t have a better definition of species than sexual compatibility. One could construct a theoretical ring species that encompasses all life on earth If the inner connections have not gone extinct
> "In higher mammals the basic property of generating fertile offspring through sexual reproduction is clear-cut and undisputed."
What's undisputed is that there are plenty of species that can and occasionally will interbreed, and yet are still considered separate species. Wolves and coyotes, for example. Horses and donkeys are famous for producing infertile offspring, but occasionally, that offspring is still fertile.
So it's not a clear-cut on/off situation. There's a gradual scale from fertility to infertility. The edges of the old definition of species can get very fuzzy. For this reason, biologists these days tend to talk more in terms of populations than species.
It's not easy to define species following a common basic definition that applies to all taxonomy ranks, specially when asexual reproduction takes place.
But this is not the case being discussed here.
With higher mammals that is not the case, and the definition of species is already well established: sexual reproduction results in fertile offspring.
Riddle me this, you have 2 populations containing 2 sub-populations each. Lets call them populations Aa and Bb. 'a' can mate with 'b' and produce c. c can produce viable offspring with A or B but A and B can not produce viable offspring. What do we call Aa and Bb if not distinct species? What do we call c?
What if some members A can produce viable offspring with B some of the time but not always? What then? My point is we make taxonomical distinctions for our convenience, they don't really have any hold on the natural world.
By this definition, are a chihuahua and a great dane the same species? With artificial insemination they would certainly produce fertile offspring, but they could almost certainly not do this naturally.
That seems to kick the issue down the road. It defines 'species' clearly, but it doesn't make it clear how to assess 'fertile reproduction', or why it should be the criterion.
Discovering a new hominid species gets you on the cover of National Geographic. Discovering a new specimen in a previously-identified hominid species does not. So, in general, the field of biological anthropology has leaned towards identifying new species when possible.
Svante Paabo, who led the group that sequenced the Neanderthal genome and discovered we interbred with them, had to decide whether to give a species- or local name to the Denisovans. The argument that carried the day was that “species” is such an ill-defined biological concept that it’s a sterile intellectual exercise arguing over it; and if they’d gone with, say, Homo altaiensis rather than Denisovans, it would’ve been extremely hard to take it back (“Neanderthal Man,” 2014, Ch. 23).
Considering Paabo secured funding from the German government for a brand-new research institute in ancient human DNA and related subjects, including the right to decide what city to build the institute in and hiring authority over the initial staff, and given that he had an advance agreement with Science to publish the Neanderthal genome, I think some of these discoverers aren’t that exercised by whether they make it onto the cover of National Geographic.
2. We can't actually test sexual reproduction of extinct "species"
3. Even if we go with the one definition of species which
is "largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring", evidence of some reproduction does not speak to how often such reproduction led to fertile offspring. For example "No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans"[1], and "Neanderthal males might not have had viable male offspring with Anatomically modern humans females"[2].
> No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans. This suggests that successful Neanderthal admixture happened in pairings with Neanderthal males and modern human females.
The full quote from [2]:
> A 2016 study presented evidence that Neanderthal males might not have had viable male offspring with AMH females. This could explain why no modern man to date has been found with a Neanderthal Y chromosome.
Also from [2]:
> Positive evidence for admixture was first published in May 2010. Neanderthal-inherited genetic material is found in all non-African populations and was initially reported to comprise 1 to 4 percent of the genome. This fraction was later refined to 1.5 to 2.1 percent.
Because the definition of species is somewhat circular. Two sets of organisms are separate species if they can’t interbreed with one another. So if there’s proof that humans and neanderthals had children together, we’re the same species. If there’s no such evidence, then we’re not.
This definition kinda breaks down when we realise that wolves and coyotes can interbreed in the wild to give birth to viable offspring.
A somewhat interesting fact is that by this definition two groups of humans can be different species simply by not being able to reach each other due to a impassable barrier
For historical and cultural reasons; you could also ask why North and South America are considered separate continents and why the Arctic is considered a continent at all. The tradional seven-continents model predates modern geology and is a mix of geological, cultural, and linguistic categorization. We might also divide them by continental plates, in which case Eurasia and Africa are distininct continents. Another approach is contiguous landmasses, which leads to a four-continents model which has Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Antarctica, and Australia along with their associated islands. There are various other models; which you prefer depends on your definition of continent and your reasons for dividing them.
Who considers the Arctic a continent? Wouldn't that be like considering the Pacific or Caribbean a continent? And many people consider North and South America to be the same continent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number
You're right that there is a definition by which “a different human race” is a sensible designation, but personally I think the concept of “race” belongs in the bin. There are many things we could sensibly call “æther”, yet we avoid the terminology because historical science papers used the word to describe a concept that's now so obviously wrong it's amusing that anybody ever thought it was the case.
Science always brings in modern-day politics. Science, in its purest form, doesn't know of silly human foibles like “ethical restraint” or “but that's almost certainly fatal”; if scientists acted purely on scientific inquiry, the scientists who didn't kill themselves in a hair-brained scheme would either be in prison or on the run.
The classification of humans into “races” is historically associated with pseudoscientific drivel that was never particularly based on reality (much, much less so than the idea of æther); even if you've found a “race” classification that actually does have an element of truth in it, giving it the same name as the Göttingen school's scientific racism is probably not a good idea.
> The reasons for Neanderthal extinction remain unclear, but going theories include violent conflict with modern humans, disease, climate change (and an inability to adapt), and, as mentioned, interbreeding.
A 1% difference in breeding rates over those 400,000 years reduces the admixture to less than 1 in a googol. These K-selective extinction theories are totally ridiculous. We should be asking how their genes survived at all against r-selective extinction. Also, the species weren’t uniform or static. There were huge K-selective differentiations with migration and climate change over that time. “Modern” human is a major misnomer, as we are very different today. 50,000 years ago, birth rates started increasing, and brain size started decreasing, with the last 20,000 years reducing it ~20% to what it was 500,000 years prior, depending on how you measure it.
I personally am not surprised this happened - the definition between concrete species is terribly fuzzy depending on how far back in time you go. There's different ways the evolutionary tree can fork, from geographic to functional to reproductive isolation. Usually the environment selects for random mutations that differentiate two similar groups of organisms.
What takes longer is for prezygotic (functional) and postzygotic (cellular biological) reproductive barriers to form to prevent direct genetic mixing. Their absence would allow human and Neanderthal populations to mix DNA pools and merge even with some biological differences, especially if the human population arrives in overwhelming numbers.
If anybody is looking for a deeper dive into the subject matter, I can recommend any kind of talks given by John Hawks [0], since they usually lie at the intersection of containing decent information and being pleasant to listen to.
In a talk he gave in Gibraltar [1] he explains the many difficulties with making claims about Neanderthals. I suppose the tl;dr is that we are really just very barely scratching the surface of understanding where Neanderthals fit into the hominid ancestry tree, but I don't feel entirely justified to sum up the talk like that, because it contains a lot of nuance. Watch it, if you have the time :).
Wasn't there an article discussed here recently, where the buried bones of a child one-eight Neanderthal had its dna sequenced? Which not only means they tolerated and buried carefully one such inter-bred person, but their parent was likely (at least tolerated) as well, as well as their great-grandparent.
Have you worked in anthropology professionally or at a graduate+ level? My experience is exactly the opposite. The views typically espoused by 'racists' (like the concept of biological races itself) are extraordinarily far from modern anthropology. Is there something you're specifically referring to?
Much further along in human history than the Neanderthals, but I can give some examples of the OP's claim from my own experience in academia. Over the last decade, genetic studies have broadly confirmed the mainstream view of the spread of the Indo-European languages, that Proto-Indo-European existed in the Pontic Steppe and the Indo-European languages were spread in various directions by populations that can now be identified not just archaeologically but also genetically. This is seen as racist by many Indians, because the popular view in India is that Sanskrit is the perfect, divine language, and all the Indo-European languages descend somehow from Sanskrit speakers leaving India for Central Asia and Europe, and spreading their civilization along the way.
Also, the uninformed layman may assume that any discussion of “Indo-European genes” is a rehabilitation of Aryan-race fantasies from the early 20th century.
Genetic studies have also sparked some disputes among indigenous peoples of the Americas, because group X says it had been there since time immemorial, but genetic findings find that the earliest buried inhabitants are genetically unrelated to the present people.
These invaders brought the Vedas (sanscript) which become modern day Hinduism and the dominant culture. The nationals don't want this to be the case, they believe light skin people came from India (could be wrong as I have never meet one of these nationalists).
Khan academy does a whole lesson in this in his ancient history course.
I think the yamnaya are very interesting people who basically wiped out all of the males in Europe. DNA shows most Europeans are from 5 males 5000 years ago when the Yamnaya invaded Europe from the step (likely Ukraine).
Can provider more links if anyone is interested.
Other things like the ability to process milk as an adult and the technology of domestication of horses added to their war ability.
The people in Europe before this were called the European hunter gathers, which were probably the ones with the high percent Neanderthal DNA.
> Can provider more links if anyone is interested.
Yes, please, thanks. Can't have too many links! p.s. I can only read the first couple of paragraphs of that link, it wants me to subscribe to read more.
> These invaders brought the Vedas (sanscript) which become modern day Hinduism
This is a pervasive myth due to accademia superficially spreadjng such nonsense, and Indians are broadly speaking quite correct to disagree.
The oldest layers of the rigveda describes an environment that seems to lie elsewhere, probably further north. Indo-Aryan religion is different, and Sanskrit is quite different from Iranian too, and this is likely due to local influences. The language too is full of non-indo-european elements (more recently an article by Lubotsky considers a Baktrian substrate for example, but without a solution). It's not really clear where and when Indo-Iranian actually split up, and I'm personally not too fond of tree models that branch out, unless you can trace it to the individual level in detail.
The grandparent's comment to the effect that the genetic lineage and socio-linguistic affiliation has been well understood is misleading as well. I'm not too deep into archaeogenetics but a society to be associated with the putative homeland remains illusive and not just as a matter of finding the bones.
> DNA shows most Europeans are from 5 males 5000 years ago when the Yamnaya invaded Europe from the step (likely Ukraine).
That shows a severe misunderstanding, that can even be found in wikipedia articles. Yamnaya is way too late and shows not the genetic profile to be the ancestor of Corded Wear, Bell Beakers and other archaeological groupings who are associated with the westward expansion.
> The people in Europe before this were called the European hunter gathers
This is not even wrong. There are also CHG (Caucasian), WHG (Western), etc. and as the names betray these are rather loose groupings.
You are very wrong on the level of a typical pop-sci article, and this doesn't even begin to touch upon the linguistic side of things, which is full of Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent.
It's all very topical because ring species typically emerge around seas, mountains or other barriers when the end of a long line of developed comes back to the start changed beyond recognition. The Indo-Iranian north-west route around the Caspian sea therefore has to deal with the subaltern counter clockwise route, the fact that Greek is considered the closest relative language (and possibly donor of the Indic script, next to Armenian), the problem of tracing Scythian where there is barely any evidence of the language, the fact that Dravidian, Turkic and other origins are so uncertain that it can't be clear to what extent they had an influence, the Armenian homeland problem, as well as the Tocharien and Hittite's origin. There is simply no esteblished hronology, just as different timelines for the Levante are a crutch.
The point where some sense of superiority is aduced and identified with, it becomes racist no matter which side of the debate you stand on, whenever you take a side.
Everyone reading the above, please don't take it seriously. For anyone working in the field, it is obvious that the parent poster is a dilettante who has read some PDFs of scholarship on the internet, but he has no formal background in the field and he hasn't even really understood what he read. His post abounds in errors and claims that no Indo-Europeanist can take seriously.
> This is seen as racist by many Indians, because the popular view in India is that Sanskrit is the perfect, divine language, and all the Indo-European languages descend somehow from Sanskrit speakers ...
This is at the same level as "White supremacists declare modern science as racist as it fails to uncover genetic superiority of white people." (If you prefer, replace "white" by your favorite ethnic group.)
Those are interesting examples. My experiences in the Southwest with the latter are that many indigenous people make a distinction between spiritual and scientific knowledge, so these aren't necessarily in conflict for them. I can also reasonably imagine how someone might not, particularly if you're referring to Anzick-1 like I suspect. Thanks
There's a lot of misinformation about this, and it often conflates the debate about DNA diversity with a semantic debate about the word 'race'.
Leaving aside the notion of 'race', there is ample evidence of clusters humans with more shared DNA that broadly lines up with what humans usually perceive as 'race'. As evidence of that, you can do a genetic test and with high confidence predict what race the subject SELF-identifies as.
...but that 2nd part is less important than the recognition that there are clusters of humans with slightly different DNA. Irrespective of how they identify, these differences provide insight into the relative function of those different genes. These differences should be studied, but are not because the notion that there might be differences between humans risks reinforcing racist ideologies.
This is academia only researching the lowest common denominator of scientific good.
"Absorbed" implies humans out left finger emoji plus okay sign emoji'ed Neanderthals either by better game or higher reproductive rates. Perhaps Neanderthals of both genders found humans of the opposite gender generally more attractive than their own kind? (Hybrid vigor hypothesis?)
I just tried to copy paste only the emojis and my comment didn't go through. This current comment had the emojis but apparently they were filtered out. Interesting
There are some limits on characters which can be posted, notably various emoji and some Unicode charactersets.
Though I did find an example of someone achieving bold text on HN (ordinarily only italic is supported via enclosing content in *asterisks*)[1] by way of some Unicode character points.
That's frowned on but not explicitly coded against, mostly because explicitly coding against stuff takes time.
HN uses a lot of soft social pressure for behavioural control. Largely to good effect IMO.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Backslash escapes seem a recent addition to that markup. They're automatically added in cases of unbalanced asterisk usage, which is how I'd noticed them.
I have no idea. Binary never seemed to work all that well on HN and I'd rather people have to use their imaginations now and then. It's not quite 100 Years of Solitude but hopefully it's more like No Exit.
Isn’t there a claim that known evidence shows it was mostly Neanderthal females + human males that resulted in offspring and not much of the other combo?
>Isn’t there a claim that known evidence shows it was mostly Neanderthal females + human males that resulted in offspring and not much of the other combo?
There may well be such a claim, although I hadn't heard it before.
However, IIUC, there isn't really evidence for Neanderthal genes in mitochondrial DNA[0] which is passed, unchanged, through the maternal line.
It's certainly possible that at some point, all female descendants of female Neanderthal ancestors somehow didn't reproduce.
Perhaps there was some incompatibility between human and Neanderthal X chromosomes?
Or perhaps it was that Neanderthal males procreated with human females at a much higher rate?
Neanderthals were assimilated by humans because they had an immune system that was better adapted to the pathogens in the areas they lived in, i.e.: Europe.
If you were an anatomically modern human from Africa, and you are migrating to Europe (neanderthal territory), if you bred with neanderthals, your offspring had a higher chance of survival due to a better adapted immune system.
But once those hybrids were everywhere, the ones with fewer neanderthal variants would prevail, eventually leaving out only the variants related to immune system.
You may David Reich’s book “Who We Are and How We Got Here” interesting. One of the assertions is that while modern Europeans have some Neanderthal genes, the Neanderthal population is one from Asia, not Europe. I “read” it by checking the audiobook out from the library and found it absorbing.
The assertion that some modern humans have traits tied back to ancient interbreeding of distinct populations is backed by research like below with Denisovans.
At least one archaic trait has clear benefits in contemporary humans. Last year (2014), Nielsen’s team reported that the Denisovan-like version of a gene called EPAS1 helps modern Tibetans to cope with life at altitudes of 4,000 metres, by preventing their blood from thickening.
I can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not because it's so so unrealistic to think that a sequenced DNA would tell you anything about the robustness of an immune system.
100 times as many humans, randomly mix in the lesser number of Neanderthals for breeding and they would be 'absorbed'.
Except you can't randomly mix them in.
Why would I allow a Neanderthal man come to my tribe and mate with my tribes women? Why would I not just kill him?
I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies.
You can't just make these theories without explaining the mechanisms.
Why wouldn’t you? The natural state of humanity isn’t to kill on sight indiscriminately. A good chunk of Latin America are descended from both native and European ancestry, in some cases more than half of some Latin American countries’ population.
There’s also a whole lot of loaded assuming here; who is to say the mixing is not of Neanderthal women and homo sapiens men?
The study simply observes evidence of interbreeding. There doesn’t really need to be a theory about why if we can observe the characteristics and genetics directly.
I imagine the blending would occur during moments of slaughter. One tribe attacks another - kills all the adults/men and takes the children/young women - and vice versa.
Over many many generations, over many tribes across europe, this would ultimately lead to blending.
If you are killing off all the Neanderthal men you are not "absorbing" them.
If Neanderthals also could do the opposite, I guess it'd be called 'absorbing', since it's more fair.
But this also would need humans accepting 50/50 children in the tribe.
When you spell it out, it doesn't make sense. This is why I'd want to know how you do this.
Adding Neanderthal women to your slaves and killing the men, and keeping them there multi-generational until they become blended makes more sense to me for instance. But that's wiping them out, not absorbing them.
I mean, would you do these things now? We live in a different time with now widely considered social conscience, but those ideas came from somewhere to start with.
> Why would I allow a Neanderthal man come to my tribe and mate with my tribes women? Why would I not just kill him?
> I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies.
Anyways, the article simply says that they found teeths with Neanderthal like roots, but Human like shape. This can possibly be fossil evidence of interbreeding and thus hybrid. They haven't checked the DNA yet, but there's prior art in modern human DNA that show some 2% coming from Neanderthal.
So the difference is we might now have fossil evidence as well as DNA that interbreeding was possible.
There's no proof of any explanation of why Neanderthal and Human would have interbred. Or if that is the single cause of pure bred Neanderthals disappearing. The discovery doesn't even make any claim to it from what I could tell.
Finally, there's a possibility the fossil isn't from a hybrid at all, but from some independently evolved specie or Neanderthal who developed Human like traits on their own. Though that seems less likely since they know the area the fossil comes from was connected to the rest of the continent.