In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
From that perspective, sapiens would be a better term than humans..
But most does. Any population originally of Asian or European descent has some Denisovan or Neanderthal DNA, or ~80 percent of the world's population.
Do you have a citation for this? I was under the impression that greater genetic diversity usually leads to greater disease resistance, because disease-prone genes tend to be eliminated more quickly by natural selection.
Not all of the work has been published yet; Razib Khan has been tweeting some recent posters/presentations on more work on Neanderthal purging and uneven inheritance suggesting that the Neanderthal variants were especially harmful for some things like the central nervous system ( https://twitter.com/jgschraiber/status/881995470515687425 https://twitter.com/StoneLab_ASU/status/881994861158813697 https://twitter.com/jgschraiber/status/881995155875692544 https://twitter.com/jgschraiber/status/881994429510365186 https://twitter.com/jgschraiber/status/881993396642091009 ).
Greater genetic diversity might seem like a good thing, but there's a lot of details. Neanderthals might have been too alien for their variants to be 'compatible' with humans (not as surprising as it might sound, an interesting paper from yesterday reports that this sort of incompatibility may be responsible for as many as 95% of one project's mouse strains dying out despite all of them being interbreedable: http://genestogenomes.org/behind-the-cover-male-infertility-... ), or they may have suffered from a higher mutation load due to their small population - small populations can't select as effectively against bad mutations, so will be genetically less healthy. (This also might be part of why human mutation load was shrinking over time up until a few thousand years ago, "The Genomic Health Of Ancient Hominins" http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/02/145193 Berens et al 2017, all the new variants being slowly sorted through.)
Thus, while some Neanderthal/Denisovan variants may have been helpful to humans (like the Tibetan altitude adaptations), overall they appear to have been harmful and are disappearing.
The pure genotypes were obviously out-competed, surviving Europeans and (East?) Asians are descendants of hybrids.
Aside 1:
> Asian is much less AFAIK, it's mostly a European thing)
Latest I heard is that it's actually the other way around, East Asians are more N. than Europeans.
Aside 2:
> my own Neanderthal percentage is just 2.4%, so I'm actually almost more Jewish than Neanderthal
So you've been told that you're mumble percent Jewish? Have you verified that you don't just happen to have a bunch of perfectly European genes that—even though characteristic for Ashkenazic Jews—are not at all unique to them because of their >60% European admixture?
Non-Neanderthal-descended-humans obviously weren't out-competed since they still exist, and because of all the evidence for harm from the Neanderthal variants which is why the variants are being selected against.
> Have you verified that you don't just happen to have a bunch of perfectly European genes that
Pretty sure. I trust 23andMe to get ancestry right for white people like me. And further, the genealogists in the family already knew about there being one Jew in the family tree who converted to Catholicism & married into the family about the right number of generations back; I had had no idea because I don't care about that sort of thing.
Anthropologists usually do call Neanderthals “humans”. Ironically, experts differ more from each other about how to define species (and Homo sapiens with it) than on how to define human. Neanderthals did interbreed with the descendants of African early modern humans, and Neanderthals are among the ancestors of people living today. For many, that is enough to recognize that Neanderthals are Homo sapiens.
...
What the data do show is that the populations that existed at the time of Neanderthals (and Denisovans) were a lot more different from each other than anybody living now. That makes the current variation of humans, including the idea of race as we usually understand it, a bad model for what was happening at the time these populations lived, more than 50,000 years ago. So we are working to find new ways to talk about these kinds of populations that will be accurate, and not rely upon our understanding of people in the present.
His longer post[2] covers more of the rapidly shifting ground in the story of human origins, which is becoming a more fascinating story almost by the day.
[1] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/this-is-a-great-question-e69bf...
[2] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-orig...
As far as I know, all Homo are humans. Homo sapiens is just one of the human species, the only one that is still extant, usually called "modern humans".
The only controversy I've heard on how to define humans is whether chimpanzees should be part of the Homo genus as well (making them humans, although a different species from us) or not.
But I don't think "human" excludes those groups, when not qualified. My understanding is that there's a continuum between the first archaic humans that diverged from chimpanzees and the behaviorally modern human. The anatomically modern human predates the behaviorally modern human. It coexisted and interbred with archaic humans, but is believed to be the predominant ancestor of all extant humans. (Although some argue that anatomically modern humans are indistinguishable from behaviorally modern humans.)
It's pretty wild to me to imagine that for all of our diversity and abundance today, there was much greater diversity of homonins at a time when we were much fewer in number.
Fewer in numbers means more isolation between groups.
In addition to that, early stages of culture may or may not have further augmented isolation. This is purely speculative of course, but we are in "imagine" territory anyways. Then the first group to develop cultural traits that somehow facilitated crossbreeding might have triggered a cascading melting pot effect, leading to the relatively uniform "modern human".
But, in articles like this, you see mixed jargons. One academic source may specialize in evolutionary biology and its particular jargon, and another source may specialize in anthropology. Their disparate perspectives and jargons are filtered through the lens of a journalist who specializes in neither field.
Each group assigns a different meaning to these words.
There is a precise and correct word in the academic context for each category of early hominids, but it probably isn't realistic to expect writers to use jargon from a field other than the one they specialize in.
As I have read the comments already given, it is obvious that there are some here who define a species very narrowly and would therefore treat the Kalhari desert people as a different species to the run of the mill European.
Even the word hybrid as applied to living organisms has major problems, especially when used in conjunction with some definitions of species.
The upshot of the various definitions is that any organism that breeds with another successfully and produces viable breeding offspring are members of the same species. In which case, Neanderthal is just one of the varieties of the homo sapiens species, no more and no less than any existing human today.
I have heard various comments about some people today of how like they are to the images we use for the Neanderthal. Since we only have skeletal remains and no actual corpses, there is much that we cannot tell about how they looked and how different any other bodily feature may have been. The experts use mostly guess work - I am not denigrating guess work based on good evidence. What I am saying is that we don't know with any certitude of the real differences, if any, between modern man and ancient man.
Things like very simple trade, slavery and religious systems could exist in some primitive, chaotic way - that would explain a lot. We are walking into the dark and we will need probably decades before proper picture of ancient people will emerge. Hopefully, there will be enough funding to continue this.
But it could be nothing. More research is important for sure.