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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Sapiens in Europe went extinct roughly the same time that Neanderthals in Europe went extinct, or shortly thereafter. Careful DNA testing has not been any to detect any DNA signature that carried from 30,000 BC to the present population. All humans, of all species, seemed to have gone extinct at some point. It is known that Europe was colonized by Neolithic farmers who expanded out of Turkey about 17,000 years ago, this group had DNA that is still found in the modern population. But none of the older DNA seems to have survived. Therefore it is not clear that Sapiens eradicated or diluted Neanderthals in Europe. They all died out.

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>It is known that Europe was colonized by Neolithic farmers who expanded out of Turkey about 17,000 years ago, this group had DNA that is still found in the modern population. But none of the older DNA seems to have survived.

This is not true. Western Hunter Gatherers preceded Neolithic farmers from Anatolia and their genes survive in the modern populations of Europe.

There are people with Neanderthal genes, so it cannot be true, that they all died out.

Maybe some European fairy-tales have much deeper roots in history than we think? Perhaps the original sleeping beauty was a Neanderthal lady kidnapped as a bride while in torpor, by an invading Sapiens group. Things like that happening back in the ice age could help explain both the remnants of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes and provide an foundation to the folk tale.

The ancestors of pretty much all Europeans could only have come in contact with the Neanderthals in the Middle East so there probably was too much movement and mixing etc. for something like that to survive.

However it’s hypothesized that during the neolithic farmers immigrating from Anatolia/etc. lived alongside the hunter gatherer communities for quite a while. The types of environments preferred by hunter gatherers didn’t have the soil suitable for early agriculture.

But there probably was still quite a but of friction and violence. Also both groups were very different phenotypically, Western Europeans had very dark/black skin and often blue eyes while the middle eastern immigrants had pale skin and dark eyes.

That mixing of Sapien and Neanderthal genes, which survives in the modern population, occurred in the Middle East, in the Caucus mountains, and in modern day Turkey. But of the Sapien DNA that we have from Europe before 30,000 BC, we cannot find any trace of it in the modern population.

>But none of the older DNA seems to have survived.

if we share 98% of our DNA with chimps from a million years ago, what does it mean to say that none of some older DNA seems to have survived?

More or less the same as you just did? i.e. these were independent branches just like chimps and humans.

Albeit there was some mixing even in the areas settled by Anatolian farmers. According to current estimates the WHG population was very low to begin with and they continued living alongside farmers for quite a while (due to both groups preferring different environments/soil types) so it probably was more gradual rather than direct replacement/genocide.

But then, where did the people the Neolithic farmers mixed with come from?

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