'Neanderthals Among Us' review
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aea6774
Bigger issue seems to be that Neanderthal inbreeding between themselves as they were living without access to other pools of dna of humans and that most probably was a cause why they did not bounce back.
I find it more likely the admixture is from girls our ancestors went to take back who were already pregnant.
Also he's a pretty good actor.
A more popular example seems to be giant Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev, who sports some serious brow ridges and a lower forehead, but still has too much chin.
"While 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives today, most people only carry about a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA, and most Neanderthal-derived DNA is non-coding. Neanderthals maintained a low genetic diversity and suffered from inbreeding depression; consequently most Neanderthal genes were probably selected out of the gene pool...
"Various estimates exist for the proportion, such as 1–4% or 3.4–7.9% in modern Eurasians, or 1.8–2.4% in modern Europeans and 2.3–2.6% in modern East Asians...
"Neanderthal [mitochondrial] DNA (which is passed on from mother to child) is absent in modern humans. This is evidence that interbreeding occurred mainly between Neanderthal males and modern human females.
"There is considerably less Neanderthal ancestry on the X-chromosome... The lack of Neanderthal-derived Y-chromosomes in modern humans (which is passed on from father to son), has also inspired the suggestions that the hybrids that contributed ancestry to modern populations were predominantly females, or that the Neanderthal Y-chromosome was not compatible with modern humans and became extinct."
I lean your way of course, it’s not totally arbitrary, but where we draw a line tends to be a bit arbitrary.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.
> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.
We're also all mixed-species.
[1] https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscien...
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out. USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
Races has nothing to do with any of that - Neanderthals themselves seems to had different looks, depending on region they were living and had contacts with other humans - and we all were the same species.
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
But it's been so long ago, I may misremember.
Therefore a useless comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clan_of_the_Cave_Bear
> Ayla's main antagonist in the novel is Broud, son of the leader Brun, who feels that she takes credit and attention away from him. As the two mature, the hatred in Broud's heart festers. When they are young adults, he brutally rapes Ayla in a bid to demonstrate his total control over her; he continues to sexually assault her multiple times a day.
No hair dragging, but something worse.
"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.
This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
I’m happy for him that his son continued in his footsteps