Archaeology @mander.xyz ooli @lemmy.world 4mo ago

Neanderthals didn't truly go extinct, but were rather absorbed into the modern human population, DNA study suggests

www.livescience.com Neanderthals didn't truly go extinct, but were rather absorbed into the modern human population, DNA study suggests

Modern human DNA may have made up a surprisingly large amount of the Neanderthal genome, a new study finds.

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iirc this has been known for a while. We had sex with them so much that they stopped existing as a separate species.
- Garrison would be proud. We truly fucked them to death.
- The ones we didn't kill. The more violent killing species is the one that survived. Yay us.
  
  We have evidence of interbreeding, but how much evidence do we have of violence between humansnand neanderthals?
  
  Murder, Rape, Pillage and Burn.
- yes, and the article mentions it.
  
  if you are on the fence about reading - its a medium length, layman accessible, enjoyable read.
- Resulting in me and my 2 percent Neanderthal DNA
I know a few
I definitely know someone who is descended from a neanderthal.
- Marjorie Taylor Greene?
- Most likely your mother
  
  Oh, gottem!
I’ve got a bit of Neanderthal DNA, and a lot of folks of Eastern European descent do as well. My ancestors were swingers, I guess.
Im roughly 2 percent
- Post your browline
  
  I can't get th3 camera far enough away to capture it all
There's a fantastic youtube channel by Stephan Milo that does nothing but explore the origins of "humans" (in the very broad sense).

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ9jWH_8tJ-Nmaj8dSQdEYA
How were we able to procreate with a different species? Are there other instances of this in nature?

I thought mating two species created sterile offspring (mules).
- Simply put, it's not that simple.
- That just depends on how the chromosomes match A mule is sterile only because it has 63 chromosomes. A horse has 64 and donkey has 62. .
  
  https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2007/ask225/
  
  Its amazing what you learn for a school paper decades that sticks with you.
- There are examples of 2 distinct species (with different chromosome count) creating (sometimes) fertile offspring: https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/when-hybrids-are-fertile-3/
  
  But genetically the neanderthalers were far less different from us than those examples. Apparently all modern humans share 99.9% of DNA and neanderthalers shared 99.7% of that. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/are-neanderthals-and-homo-sapiens-the-same-species
  
  So the no viable offspring rule might not be that good for differentiating species, but that also doesn't mean that neanderthalers and us were not the same species. The more I read on it, the more I think that we were. Apparently we interbred quite a lot over the millennia.
  
  Is there any way to tell if certain gender-pairs were more common in interspecies mating between sapiens and neanderthals? For example, are we able to tell if the male partner was more or less likely to be sapien or neanderthal?
- Coincidentally just just watched this Gutsick Gibbon (primatologist) vid which touches on this a bit (though not the main topic). https://youtu.be/dy7_LousWVo
- Well, this newfound knowledge could have us decide that Neanderthals were not a different species, actually.
We call them MAGA now.
- In an archaeology sub. Really. This is exactly why the US is so divided and why violence is your most likely outcome. Grow a personality and stop dragging politics into everything.
- Neanderthals had greater social intelligence than sapiens. Why are you complimenting Nazis?

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