More evidence that Neanderthals were ‘absorbed’ by humans, not wiped out
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Anyways, the article simply says that they found teeths with Neanderthal like roots, but Human like shape. This can possibly be fossil evidence of interbreeding and thus hybrid. They haven't checked the DNA yet, but there's prior art in modern human DNA that show some 2% coming from Neanderthal.
So the difference is we might now have fossil evidence as well as DNA that interbreeding was possible.
There's no proof of any explanation of why Neanderthal and Human would have interbred. Or if that is the single cause of pure bred Neanderthals disappearing. The discovery doesn't even make any claim to it from what I could tell.
Finally, there's a possibility the fossil isn't from a hybrid at all, but from some independently evolved specie or Neanderthal who developed Human like traits on their own. Though that seems less likely since they know the area the fossil comes from was connected to the rest of the continent.
(At the same time, who knows what was socially accepted back then, at various places)
It really depends on what the ruler of the nearest Free City thought of that, not what we think of that
What an ignorant statement. Neanderthals were a Hominid in the genera Homo that co-existed at some point with Homo Sapiens.
Whether or not they were a subspecies of H. Sapiens or a separate species within the genera is an entire field of study. (i.e. Siberian Tiger and Bengal Tiger vs. Siberian Tiger and Lion)
If it were as simple as your claim, this article and the research that is it's subject would not exist.
The prevailing theory is that your claim here is entirely wrong, and that early humans killed and possibly ate the Neanderthals rather than interbreeding with them.
Step back and think about what you are doing right now. You're commenting about scientific research around an unknown point in anthropological history... making claims that would require you to know that point of history that is not known.
Says who? I wasn't aware of "human" being a term of art in evolutionary biology.
Though I do seem to recall all sorts of hominids being called "early humans" in my elementary and middle school texts.
In this context, the taxonomy used is this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_nomenclature
In that taxonomy, Human refers to the species of Homo sapiens. Wikipedia list the classification for it pretty well under the "Scientific classification" header: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
Until very recently, it was presumpted that modern humans (me and you) came exclusively from the Homo Sapiens specie.
> Though I do seem to recall all sorts of hominids being called "early humans" in my elementary and middle school texts
Yes sometimes Human could refer to the genus Homo instead of the species Homo Sapiens. Which is where people will say modern human/early human to disambiguate.
But what is novel is that modern humans might not actually be Homo Sapiens, but hybrids of different species from the genus of Homo, such as Homo Neanderthalensis.
This has been shown in 2010 thorough novel DNA evidence from modern human DNA. And this article just now shows that we found a teeth with hybrid characteristics.
Even more interesting, not every modern human have Homo Neanderthalensis DNA in them.
All of this is new development, and there's still much we don't know.
For a long time it wasn't known if they could interbreed, and it wasn't known if they did, or how common it would be. Now it is seemingly more plausible that they could and they did.
Think about monkeys for example, it's not that common (though I think we're also realizing it might be more common than we first thought) for them to interbreed with other species of monkey.
They might have been more similar in the past, but now they're well speciated.
> What explanation should there be?
Basically for every discovery of a possible human ancestry, we will need evidence of interbreeding, we can't just assume off course they all interbred. That's not science.
So this evidence is relatively new, in 2010 we found modern humans have about 2% DNA, and now we found a fossil teeth that appears to have hybrid characteristics.
My second issue is with people making assertions like: well off course probably they were tribal and at war with each other and would have a tradition of keeping the females of their enemies. Or off course they would have been attracted physically to each other. Etc.
We can all make up whatever explanation we want to believe in, that does not make it true. We'll similarly need to slowly unravel evidence that points towards those explanations to get an accurate understanding. And I was simply saying this new teeth discovery gives us no insight into this. So it seems we still don't know why they'd have interbred, how common it was, if all occurrence could successfully lead to offspring, when it would have started to happen, etc.
I totally agree there. Don't assume too much about circumstances and lifestyles that we don't know about. Although I think that line was mostly a list of speculative examples, and not intended as a definitive explanation.
But given humans, it's not too crazy to assume some of them will have sex. And given that we've known for about 10 years that some humans (Europeans especially, I believe) have some small amount of Neanderthal DNA, clearly they did, and were at least somewhat interfertile.
But Clan of the Cave Bear was published in 1980!
(I'm a ginger, he's Mediterranean - joke's on him now we know that a smattering of Neanderthal genes weren't just for us Northern barbarians).
Is this not for each reader to judge individually?
> There's no proof of any explanation of why Neanderthal and Human would have interbred.
Not sure of the relevance of this.
Proof? It's everywhere. Nature is mostly highly organized and predictable, with flashes of randomness. Is this not evolution itself? DNA "accidents" that prove useful (or not) and become dominant (or not).
At just 2%, that's within reasonable expectation for random. It could have been higher in certain isolated pockets/communities. Unfortunately, those combinations weren't beneficial or perished for some other random reason (e.g., flash flood), and that evidence is lost in undiscovered fossils.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Abstract Thirteen permanent fully erupted teeth were excavated at the Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey in 1910 and 1911. These were all found in the same location, on a ledge behind a hearth in a Mousterian occupation level. They were originally identified as being Neanderthal. A fragment of occipital bone was found in a separate locality in a later season. Recent dating of adjacent sediments gives a probable age of <48 ka. The purpose of this article is to provide an updated description of the morphology of this material and consider its likely taxonomic assignment from comparison with Neanderthal and Homo sapiens samples. One of the original teeth has been lost, and we identify one as nonhominin. At least two adult individuals are represented. Cervix shape and the absence of common Neanderthal traits in several teeth suggest affinities with H. sapiens in both individuals, while crown and root dimensions and root morphology of all the teeth are entirely consistent with a Neanderthal attribution, pointing toward a possible shared Neanderthal and H. sapiens ancestry (the likely date of this material corresponds with the time in which both Neanderthals and H. sapiens were present in Europe). The occipital fragment is stratigraphically more recent and does not exhibit any diagnostic Neanderthal features.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15251536819818479... [2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/origins-evolution...
But war in the ancient times, would result in DNA intermingling. The men would be killed, and the women kept alive.
An example from the Bible:
Dueteronomy 20:12-15
12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
Regarding female captives - Deuteronomy 21:10-14
10 When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, 11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails 13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.
This what war and conflict was like in the ancient world, in recorded history. It was likely very similar to this in pre-history when there was conflict between modern humans and Neanderthals. The males would be killed and the women takes as wives/(sex)slaves.
The DNA evidence does nothing to dispute violent conflict between humans and Neanderthals.
We already knew that Neanderthals and H. Sapiens interbred. While their finding of teeth is cool, that just reinforces what we already knew.
It doesn't say anything about how this interbreeding occurred or about the relationship between the two species.
Articles like this always have a kind of ‘huh, I wonder what really DID happen to all those Neanderthals?’ vibe to them.
We’ve all seen what human societies do to each other, especially if one considers the other inferior.
Also, the excellent Tides of History podcast is doing a series on early humans. The host Patrick Wyman started this cycle in July 2020 and a lot of the material he talks about is based on the latest archaeological evidence and understanding. Very much worth listening to, and it's available on the usual podcasting platforms.
Available in: https://archive.org/details/QuestforFire.1981.720p.BluRay.X2...
"La guerre du feu" was written more than a century ago, and the author was more interested in romance and adventure (and selling books) than in scientific accuracy. The film removes or softens the colonialist and dated perspective (tribes of inferior humans, fully domesticating mammoth, fighting for a woman...) and portrays the cooperation between tribes.
Science always brings in modern-day politics. Science, in its purest form, doesn't know of silly human foibles like “ethical restraint” or “but that's almost certainly fatal”; if scientists acted purely on scientific inquiry, the scientists who didn't kill themselves in a hair-brained scheme would either be in prison or on the run.
The classification of humans into “races” is historically associated with pseudoscientific drivel that was never particularly based on reality (much, much less so than the idea of æther); even if you've found a “race” classification that actually does have an element of truth in it, giving it the same name as the Göttingen school's scientific racism is probably not a good idea.
Considering Paabo secured funding from the German government for a brand-new research institute in ancient human DNA and related subjects, including the right to decide what city to build the institute in and hiring authority over the initial staff, and given that he had an advance agreement with Science to publish the Neanderthal genome, I think some of these discoverers aren’t that exercised by whether they make it onto the cover of National Geographic.
Cite?
But this is not the case being discussed here.
With higher mammals that is not the case, and the definition of species is already well established: sexual reproduction results in fertile offspring.
Your remark is only relevant when nit-picking corner cases involving asexual reproduction, which I don't expect to be the case in Neanderthal-Human cross-breeding.
Hence the species problem being a debate regarding generic traits, and which should count and not count, hoping to form a common definition.
Here's an example: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2014.04.004
What's undisputed is that there are plenty of species that can and occasionally will interbreed, and yet are still considered separate species. Wolves and coyotes, for example. Horses and donkeys are famous for producing infertile offspring, but occasionally, that offspring is still fertile.
So it's not a clear-cut on/off situation. There's a gradual scale from fertility to infertility. The edges of the old definition of species can get very fuzzy. For this reason, biologists these days tend to talk more in terms of populations than species.
No one. That's the result of a brain fart I would edit if I could. Apologies for the confusion.
This definition kinda breaks down when we realise that wolves and coyotes can interbreed in the wild to give birth to viable offspring.
2. We can't actually test sexual reproduction of extinct "species"
3. Even if we go with the one definition of species which is "largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring", evidence of some reproduction does not speak to how often such reproduction led to fertile offspring. For example "No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans"[1], and "Neanderthal males might not have had viable male offspring with Anatomically modern humans females"[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics#Interbree...
The full quote from [1]:
> No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans. This suggests that successful Neanderthal admixture happened in pairings with Neanderthal males and modern human females.
The full quote from [2]:
> A 2016 study presented evidence that Neanderthal males might not have had viable male offspring with AMH females. This could explain why no modern man to date has been found with a Neanderthal Y chromosome.
Also from [2]:
> Positive evidence for admixture was first published in May 2010. Neanderthal-inherited genetic material is found in all non-African populations and was initially reported to comprise 1 to 4 percent of the genome. This fraction was later refined to 1.5 to 2.1 percent.
I am.
A 1% difference in breeding rates over those 400,000 years reduces the admixture to less than 1 in a googol. These K-selective extinction theories are totally ridiculous. We should be asking how their genes survived at all against r-selective extinction. Also, the species weren’t uniform or static. There were huge K-selective differentiations with migration and climate change over that time. “Modern” human is a major misnomer, as we are very different today. 50,000 years ago, birth rates started increasing, and brain size started decreasing, with the last 20,000 years reducing it ~20% to what it was 500,000 years prior, depending on how you measure it.
What takes longer is for prezygotic (functional) and postzygotic (cellular biological) reproductive barriers to form to prevent direct genetic mixing. Their absence would allow human and Neanderthal populations to mix DNA pools and merge even with some biological differences, especially if the human population arrives in overwhelming numbers.
In a talk he gave in Gibraltar [1] he explains the many difficulties with making claims about Neanderthals. I suppose the tl;dr is that we are really just very barely scratching the surface of understanding where Neanderthals fit into the hominid ancestry tree, but I don't feel entirely justified to sum up the talk like that, because it contains a lot of nuance. Watch it, if you have the time :).
[0] https://www.anthropology.wisc.edu/staff/hawks-john/
[1] (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa3258dAOxo
Enslaved by humans is just as conceivable an outcome for the Neanderthals as being wiped out.
And it would explain the 2% homology.
Also, the uninformed layman may assume that any discussion of “Indo-European genes” is a rehabilitation of Aryan-race fantasies from the early 20th century.
Genetic studies have also sparked some disputes among indigenous peoples of the Americas, because group X says it had been there since time immemorial, but genetic findings find that the earliest buried inhabitants are genetically unrelated to the present people.
This is at the same level as "White supremacists declare modern science as racist as it fails to uncover genetic superiority of white people." (If you prefer, replace "white" by your favorite ethnic group.)
Indian nationalists don't like the invasion theory, which is a group of nomadic people invaded the Indus valley (yamnaya people: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of...)
These invaders brought the Vedas (sanscript) which become modern day Hinduism and the dominant culture. The nationals don't want this to be the case, they believe light skin people came from India (could be wrong as I have never meet one of these nationalists).
Khan academy does a whole lesson in this in his ancient history course.
I think the yamnaya are very interesting people who basically wiped out all of the males in Europe. DNA shows most Europeans are from 5 males 5000 years ago when the Yamnaya invaded Europe from the step (likely Ukraine).
Can provider more links if anyone is interested.
Other things like the ability to process milk as an adult and the technology of domestication of horses added to their war ability.
The people in Europe before this were called the European hunter gathers, which were probably the ones with the high percent Neanderthal DNA.
Yes, please, thanks. Can't have too many links! p.s. I can only read the first couple of paragraphs of that link, it wants me to subscribe to read more.
This is a pervasive myth due to accademia superficially spreadjng such nonsense, and Indians are broadly speaking quite correct to disagree.
The oldest layers of the rigveda describes an environment that seems to lie elsewhere, probably further north. Indo-Aryan religion is different, and Sanskrit is quite different from Iranian too, and this is likely due to local influences. The language too is full of non-indo-european elements (more recently an article by Lubotsky considers a Baktrian substrate for example, but without a solution). It's not really clear where and when Indo-Iranian actually split up, and I'm personally not too fond of tree models that branch out, unless you can trace it to the individual level in detail.
The grandparent's comment to the effect that the genetic lineage and socio-linguistic affiliation has been well understood is misleading as well. I'm not too deep into archaeogenetics but a society to be associated with the putative homeland remains illusive and not just as a matter of finding the bones.
> DNA shows most Europeans are from 5 males 5000 years ago when the Yamnaya invaded Europe from the step (likely Ukraine).
That shows a severe misunderstanding, that can even be found in wikipedia articles. Yamnaya is way too late and shows not the genetic profile to be the ancestor of Corded Wear, Bell Beakers and other archaeological groupings who are associated with the westward expansion.
> The people in Europe before this were called the European hunter gathers
This is not even wrong. There are also CHG (Caucasian), WHG (Western), etc. and as the names betray these are rather loose groupings.
You are very wrong on the level of a typical pop-sci article, and this doesn't even begin to touch upon the linguistic side of things, which is full of Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent.
It's all very topical because ring species typically emerge around seas, mountains or other barriers when the end of a long line of developed comes back to the start changed beyond recognition. The Indo-Iranian north-west route around the Caspian sea therefore has to deal with the subaltern counter clockwise route, the fact that Greek is considered the closest relative language (and possibly donor of the Indic script, next to Armenian), the problem of tracing Scythian where there is barely any evidence of the language, the fact that Dravidian, Turkic and other origins are so uncertain that it can't be clear to what extent they had an influence, the Armenian homeland problem, as well as the Tocharien and Hittite's origin. There is simply no esteblished hronology, just as different timelines for the Levante are a crutch.
The point where some sense of superiority is aduced and identified with, it becomes racist no matter which side of the debate you stand on, whenever you take a side.
There's a lot of misinformation about this, and it often conflates the debate about DNA diversity with a semantic debate about the word 'race'.
Leaving aside the notion of 'race', there is ample evidence of clusters humans with more shared DNA that broadly lines up with what humans usually perceive as 'race'. As evidence of that, you can do a genetic test and with high confidence predict what race the subject SELF-identifies as.
...but that 2nd part is less important than the recognition that there are clusters of humans with slightly different DNA. Irrespective of how they identify, these differences provide insight into the relative function of those different genes. These differences should be studied, but are not because the notion that there might be differences between humans risks reinforcing racist ideologies.
This is academia only researching the lowest common denominator of scientific good.
Though I did find an example of someone achieving bold text on HN (ordinarily only italic is supported via enclosing content in *asterisks*)[1] by way of some Unicode character points.
That's frowned on but not explicitly coded against, mostly because explicitly coding against stuff takes time.
HN uses a lot of soft social pressure for behavioural control. Largely to good effect IMO.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Backslash escapes seem a recent addition to that markup. They're automatically added in cases of unbalanced asterisk usage, which is how I'd noticed them.
There may well be such a claim, although I hadn't heard it before.
However, IIUC, there isn't really evidence for Neanderthal genes in mitochondrial DNA[0] which is passed, unchanged, through the maternal line.
It's certainly possible that at some point, all female descendants of female Neanderthal ancestors somehow didn't reproduce.
Perhaps there was some incompatibility between human and Neanderthal X chromosomes?
Or perhaps it was that Neanderthal males procreated with human females at a much higher rate?
We'll likely never know for sure.
[0] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an...
If you were an anatomically modern human from Africa, and you are migrating to Europe (neanderthal territory), if you bred with neanderthals, your offspring had a higher chance of survival due to a better adapted immune system.
But once those hybrids were everywhere, the ones with fewer neanderthal variants would prevail, eventually leaving out only the variants related to immune system.
The rest is simply diffing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_We_Are_and_How_We_Got_Here
The assertion that some modern humans have traits tied back to ancient interbreeding of distinct populations is backed by research like below with Denisovans.
At least one archaic trait has clear benefits in contemporary humans. Last year (2014), Nielsen’s team reported that the Denisovan-like version of a gene called EPAS1 helps modern Tibetans to cope with life at altitudes of 4,000 metres, by preventing their blood from thickening.
https://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-had-outsize-effect-...
100 times as many humans, randomly mix in the lesser number of Neanderthals for breeding and they would be 'absorbed'.
Except you can't randomly mix them in.
Why would I allow a Neanderthal man come to my tribe and mate with my tribes women? Why would I not just kill him?
I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies.
You can't just make these theories without explaining the mechanisms.
Over many many generations, over many tribes across europe, this would ultimately lead to blending.
If Neanderthals also could do the opposite, I guess it'd be called 'absorbing', since it's more fair.
But this also would need humans accepting 50/50 children in the tribe.
When you spell it out, it doesn't make sense. This is why I'd want to know how you do this.
Adding Neanderthal women to your slaves and killing the men, and keeping them there multi-generational until they become blended makes more sense to me for instance. But that's wiping them out, not absorbing them.
There’s also a whole lot of loaded assuming here; who is to say the mixing is not of Neanderthal women and homo sapiens men?
The study simply observes evidence of interbreeding. There doesn’t really need to be a theory about why if we can observe the characteristics and genetics directly.
> I get I'd also be at war with other tribes killing their men, but Neanderthals I assume are easy to kill tactically and emotionally and I wouldn't expect them to be good allies.
You scienced this one like a pro.