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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

well they sort of did - modern Europeans are now acknowledged to carry some Neanderthal DNA (estimates go somewhere between 1.5-20% depending on how you count)

People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans

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> People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans

The strongest real inferiority argument is that we survived and they didn't. But if they/we are still here then that's right out the window.

adding australian aborigines, who some consider to be the oldest human civilization, dna-wise

https://www.history.com/news/dna-study-finds-aboriginal-aust...

You forget about Africa which seems to have the largest genetic diversity of Homo Sapiens (the prehistoric dispora seems to have been a genetic narrowing point) - that means wider tails on bell curves - it's why they have the tallest and shortest populations, the fastest (and probably slowest), etc etc

Yeah, the Khoisan seem to be the FIRST population group to diverge from mainstream homo Sapiens (or was it the other way around?), and IIRC supposedly compose half of humanity by numbers back 100,000-20,000 years ago. It seems Ice Age Central and Southern Africa were the best biome for hunting-gathering humans.

Of course, post-agriculture most humanity lives in (East and South) Asia, except in Cyrus' age where a third of humanity lives in West Asia and Eastern North Africa. Persia ruled 1/3rd of humanity then, the most out of any empire after that. Except perhaps China of some periods

There is no such thing as oldest, dna-wise. Not like dna is frozen in time for some people but not others.

What is meant here is "most divergent" genetics, but that sounds potentially loaded and less nice than "oldest".

See also the genetics of the San people here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people#Genetics

You reminded me of this Sam Harris tweet https://twitter.com/samharrisorg/status/429007702803492865

One of his observations was imagining what a disaster it would have been if this finding had gone the 'other' way.

Poorly-aged tweet - in Who We Are and How We Got Here Robert Reich talks about the strong evidence for the existence of a "ghost population" that interbred only with the ancestors of modern sub-Saharan Africans. It's a ghost because we don't have any physical remains like we do with Neanderthals and Denisovans, but there is an ancient genetic signature that exists only in that population.

More generally - because people use motivated reasoning, you could just as easily spin the Neanderthal finding the opposite way. "Neanderthal ancestry is a secret superpower that makes Asian and European people special!" or whatever. Once you have your conclusion, you can spin the facts to fit your narrative.

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