They aren't. They are Homo sapiens, vs homo neanderthalis, homo erectus or the like. There used to be many closely related humans. But we eradicated them (in all likelihood).
From that perspective, sapiens would be a better term than humans..
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.