The Racists Really Won't Like This!
A new study out has figured out about 60% of the letters of DNA from three different Neanderthal bones. It is amazing how much a scientist can learn from a long extinct relative.
First off, it looks like there was some interbreeding between species at some point. By comparing human and Neanderthal DNA, scientists can tell that around 1-4% of European and Asian DNA came from Neanderthals. And it looks like Africans have no Neanderthal DNA at all.
This is just what might be expected if there was interbreeding because Neanderthals and Africans probably never met. All the evidence so far points to Neanderthals living in Europe and Asia and not in Africa. (source)
Racists have tended to depict Africans as more primitive than Europeans or Asians. However, when most of us think of primitive humans, Neanderthals come to mind. The latest theory on the demise of Neanderthals no longer has them being killed off by modern Man or dying off by an inability to compete. Rather, it looks like the moderns and Neanderthals interbred. They blended in, genetically speaking, with modern man.
Tags: Neanderthals
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Matt Giwer -
I have no idea how racist gets into this but 1-4% does not indicate disappearance by interbreeding. That is way too low.
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Permalink Reply by RobertPiano -
I was reading how that could happen...
http://www.hypothesisjournal.com/?p=932
It's a unique case because both species are from common ancestors. The idea that a man called jesus had some 300,000 year old DNA, thanks to Neanderthals is a bit ironic for the new earth idiots.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Giwer
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It never hurts to describe these things properly. It is ironic that Jesus had sponge DNA in him. We all do. Neanderthals are simply a different branch of the same hominids that we are. That they are pegged as having branched earlier does not make their DNA older.
When Neanderthal DNA was analyzed sequences unique to them were found. Turns out they were not unique but are found so some degree in some groups of us. The same is true of Denisovians. It does not indicated older. It is in us. It is as modern as we are.
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Permalink Reply by RobertPiano
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The theory that Jesus had grandparents that copulated with Neanderthals is just so much more satisfying to me than the fact he shares many gene families with the kingdom of animals. In fact, the creationists made a big deal about the sponge genome study as some sort of lame attempt at disproving evolution.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Giwer
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You mean like David beat Goliath because David was a neanderthal.
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Permalink Reply by Holo Gram -
Racists have tended to depict Africans as more primitive than Europeans or Asians.
Yes, primitive is not the correct word, and I'm no expert on the subject. But much of Africa, pre colonialism, was centuries behind Europe and Asia in social cultural evolution. Because of environmental conditions, people in the northern and southern parts of Africa tended to farm and domesticate animals, but in central Africa they tended more toward tribe-like hunter-gatherers. Social cultural traditions are passed down through the generations and resist change. So when colonialists uprooted millions of Africans and forced the two social cultures to intermix, this caused all kinds of problems and may have been responsible for a number of recent genocides. Also millions of Africans were transported to other countries as slaves and thrust into radically different social cultural environments for which they weren't ready. So many of today's Africans, wherever they may reside in the world, aren't primitive; they are just social culturally different than we racist Europeans or Asians or Americans.
These same ideas apply to many other social cultures around the world who have been involuntarily thrust into radically different social cultures.
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Permalink Reply by Unseen -
The English were pretty barbaric through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. I don't mean just the peasants, either. However, next door to them were the Scots and Irish who were every bit as backward and tribal as many an African tribe was (and certainly not all African tribes were backward: there were actual civilizations in Africa).
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Permalink Reply by KimAnne -
This is great, I watched the documentary a couple nights ago, it included several people in a class that had decided to do DAN testing to prove this point. The person with the most (3%) Neanderthal DNA was the most Aryan in appearance............couldn't help but laugh.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Giwer
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Aryans changed to Indo-Europeans after WWII meant the language group originated in the Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran region of the world. However a more recent study puts the origin of the language group in or around modern Macedonia.
It is not wise to take what WWII propaganda said about the idea of Aryan. It may be a fun joke to laugh at Herrnvolk but in the late 19th c. the English were openly talking about their natural fitness to rule the world. In hindsight which was the silliest?
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Permalink Reply by KimAnne
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Guess you just had to be there.
What I do believe is that there is no superior color of the human race. Humans are amazing creatures, we can also be some of the most ignorant.
I plan to continue being happy to be human and find humor (vs anger/annoyance) in our silliness and sometimes misguided misunderstandings of our place in the Universe.
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Permalink Reply by Nina van der Roos -
And the racists come into this where exactly ? When i have seen the odd bit a racist literature it has never mentioned Neanderthals, or even ancient man
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Permalink Reply by Matt Giwer
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I am still trying to figure that out. Neanderthals were a separate species and now we find not different enough to prevent interbreeding but still not a race. The simplest division of races are Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid and for some weird people Jewisoid.
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