Sex With Humans Made Neanderthals Extinct?

[salvorhardin]

Drove Neanderthals extinct, or did the Neanderthals successfully co-opt human DNA, hmm? ;-)

Neanderthals may have been victims of love, or at least of interspecies breeding with modern humans, according to a new study.

As the heavy-browed species ventured farther and farther to cope with climate change, they increasingly mated with our own species, giving rise to mixed-species humans, researchers suggest.

Over generations of genetic mixing, the Neanderthal genome would have dissolved, absorbed into the Homo sapiens population, which was much larger.

"If you increase the mobility of the groups in the places where they live, you end up increasing the gene flow between the two different populations, until eventually one population disappears as a clearly defined group," said study co-author C. Michael Barton, an archaeologst at Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

Full article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/11/111125-neanderthals-sex-humans-dna-science-extinct

[xchrom]

1. Very interesting. Nt

[phantom power]

2. Hmm... so did the Neanderthals disappear, or did we...

[Jackpine Radical]

4. What you mean "We," Cro-Maggie?

[Warpy]

3. Other groups of hominids also existed along the route

out of Africa and across the globe. Likely we bred with all of them, something that would explain "racial" characteristics. Had we not interbred, we'd all likely resemble the bushmen in the Kalahari Desert.

The Yale forensic reconstruction you have shows a dirty and unkempt being, although recognizably human. The reconstruction of a child, kept a little cleaner, shows someone who wouldn't be looked at funny in a crowd:


They had red hair, pale skin, and the hyoid bones necessary for forming speech. They were likely just as human as the migrants out of Africa, maybe more so since they cared for their infirm and honored their dead with ritual burials.

But we did interbreed and I find it rather comforting that we didn't just slaughter them in a genocidal rage.

[saras]

5. "But we did interbreed and..." the two are not mutually exclusive, unfortunately

The bad news is that racism may go back much farther than previously thought.

[Odin2005]

10. Exactly, "interbreeding" could mean murdering the men and raping the women.

[libinnyandia]

6. I have always felt sad that the Neanderthals disappeared and

feel good that they live on, even if only as part of the human line.

[salvorhardin]

8. Oh, I agree completely

The illustration I used was the illustration that NatGeo used, I didn't pick it to alienate Neanderthals. On FB I joked that she bore an eerie resemblance to one of my great aunts, but I was only half joking. Put her hair in a bun, give her a 1940s house dress, a pair of faux pearl ear rings, and she could be the spitting image of my great aunt Marie.

[bvar22]

7. I had a girlfriend like that once.

I was lucky to get out alive.

[dtexdem]

9. What, Herm Cain and Newt Gingrich were around then?

;-)

[NMMNG]

11. I think they live on to some extent

We see evidence of it every day. ;-)

[gtar100]

12. Why do so many reconstruction artists feel the need to make them so ruddy

and unkempt? Time after time I see this, yet there is evidence of them caring for their families (burials, rituals, etc). Is it so hard to imagine that they honored their bodies too? What is it about humans that makes us look at "the other" with such disdain?

[MilesColtrane]

13. Hey, we've all been in the bar at closing time after one too many, and...

have been feeling desperate for companionship.

Am I right?

[krispos42]

14. Now if it coincided with the develoment of beer...

...we'd have conclusive proof of the effectiveness of beer goggles.


:hide: