PHOTO: CLAIM THEY ARE NEANDERTHALS; women volunteer their husbands as subjects for neanderthal study
Find Your Inner Neanderthal
Published by ScottH under Ancestry
SEVEN million years ago ALL OF US were chimpanzees. Humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor with chimpanzees — our next closest mammalian relative — that goes back between five and seven million years.
Neanderthals had bigger brains and muscles, but for some reason Neanderthals —thick boned humans who thrived for 400,000 years in Europe and parts of Asia— "died out" about 30,000 years ago, while we modern humans (only around for 200,000 years) survived. Or, are modern humans a hybrid of Neanderthals with Homo sapiens?
Why would Homo sapiens flourish and our Homo neandertalensis cousins die out? Its an evolutionary mystery that biologists are trying to unravel. Perhaps Neanderthals never "died out" but instead bred with homo sapiens and all modern humans are part neanderthal?
In the last few years, scientists have uncovered clues not just to what the lives of Neanderthals may have been like, but also clues that tell us more about what it means to be a modern human.
Most interesting of all is that, although Neanderthals disappeared long ago, their DNA lives on in all non-African people.
23andMe now offers a lab allowing customers to connect with their prehistoric roots. The lab, developed by one of our resident computational biologists, Eric Durand, compares two modern human genomes with the Neanderthal genome to determine what percentage of your own DNA is Neanderthal. Before coming to 23andMe, Eric worked on the first draft of the Neanderthal genome and on analysis of the Denisova genome, another of our early human cousins. The method we use to determine the percent of Neanderthal DNA a person has is similar to the one Eric helped develop while working at the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. See Eric’s white paper for a technical explanation of the methodology.
Most people have Neanderthal DNA, on average about 2.5 percent, but there are outliers, who have much more.
What it means to have a higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA — whether you’re hairier, or brutish or short, for instance — isn’t known. There are some theories, however, of how Neanderthals contributed to modern humans, including that they gave us some sort of “hybrid vigor,” according to Peter Parham, a geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine.
At the very least research appears to support the theory that at some point during the tens of thousands of years Neanderthals and modern humans lived side by side, a few of them may have shacked up.
Or as Elizabeth Kolbert deftly phrased it in the New Yorker:“Before modern humans ‘replaced’ the Neanderthals, they had sex with them.”
Provocative to say the least, but it’s actually an idea that’s floated around for some time. Anybody who ever read Jean M. Auel’s saucy prehistoric romance books beginning with “Clan of the Cave Bear” could tell you that. But the notion that modern humans and Neanderthals got way past first base, hooked up and even had children together still doesn’t tell us much about what it means now to have a smidgen of Neanderthal in your DNA.
Svante Pääbo, the Swedish geneticist behind the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, explains that from an evolutionary point of view comparing the modern human’s genome to that of the Neanderthal has great value.
Humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor with chimpanzees — our next closest mammalian relative — that goes back between five and seven million years. Comparing the human genome with that of chimps tells us a lot about evolution over millions of years. But by having the Neanderthal genome sequence — now 55 percent completed — and comparing that with modern humans, we can learn much more about evolutionary changes over the last 30,000 years.
It may be that the DNA of other prehistoric human groups also are intermixed in our own DNA. Much like with Neanderthals, scientists extracted ancient DNA from the skeletal remains of another ancient cousin known as the Denisovans. The remains — a finger bone — were found in a cave in Siberia and showed that Denisovans were cousins of Neanderthals. They lived in Asia and disappeared about 40,000 years ago. Their DNA is found today in Melanesians.
As for the comparisons with the Neanderthals, so far, Pääbo’s team has found almost 80 genetic variants that are unique to modern humans. The function of these variants could help us understand what distinguishes us from Neanderthal.
Apparently Pääbo’s work has also resonated beyond the scientific community as well. At a talk late last year, Pääbo told a group of neuroscientists that for months he’s been keeping emails from people who have claimed that they were Neanderthal and should be included in his study. Several women have written to him volunteering their husbands as subjects for study.
Got Neanderthal DNA?
23andMe customers can find their inner Neanderthal or at least how much Neanderthal DNA they have at 23andMe Ancestry Labs. Not yet a customer? Visit our store!
Published by ScottH under Ancestry
SEVEN million years ago ALL OF US were chimpanzees. Humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor with chimpanzees — our next closest mammalian relative — that goes back between five and seven million years.
Neanderthals had bigger brains and muscles, but for some reason Neanderthals —thick boned humans who thrived for 400,000 years in Europe and parts of Asia— "died out" about 30,000 years ago, while we modern humans (only around for 200,000 years) survived. Or, are modern humans a hybrid of Neanderthals with Homo sapiens?
Why would Homo sapiens flourish and our Homo neandertalensis cousins die out? Its an evolutionary mystery that biologists are trying to unravel. Perhaps Neanderthals never "died out" but instead bred with homo sapiens and all modern humans are part neanderthal?
In the last few years, scientists have uncovered clues not just to what the lives of Neanderthals may have been like, but also clues that tell us more about what it means to be a modern human.
Most interesting of all is that, although Neanderthals disappeared long ago, their DNA lives on in all non-African people.
23andMe now offers a lab allowing customers to connect with their prehistoric roots. The lab, developed by one of our resident computational biologists, Eric Durand, compares two modern human genomes with the Neanderthal genome to determine what percentage of your own DNA is Neanderthal. Before coming to 23andMe, Eric worked on the first draft of the Neanderthal genome and on analysis of the Denisova genome, another of our early human cousins. The method we use to determine the percent of Neanderthal DNA a person has is similar to the one Eric helped develop while working at the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. See Eric’s white paper for a technical explanation of the methodology.
Most people have Neanderthal DNA, on average about 2.5 percent, but there are outliers, who have much more.
What it means to have a higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA — whether you’re hairier, or brutish or short, for instance — isn’t known. There are some theories, however, of how Neanderthals contributed to modern humans, including that they gave us some sort of “hybrid vigor,” according to Peter Parham, a geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine.
At the very least research appears to support the theory that at some point during the tens of thousands of years Neanderthals and modern humans lived side by side, a few of them may have shacked up.
Or as Elizabeth Kolbert deftly phrased it in the New Yorker:“Before modern humans ‘replaced’ the Neanderthals, they had sex with them.”
Provocative to say the least, but it’s actually an idea that’s floated around for some time. Anybody who ever read Jean M. Auel’s saucy prehistoric romance books beginning with “Clan of the Cave Bear” could tell you that. But the notion that modern humans and Neanderthals got way past first base, hooked up and even had children together still doesn’t tell us much about what it means now to have a smidgen of Neanderthal in your DNA.
Svante Pääbo, the Swedish geneticist behind the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, explains that from an evolutionary point of view comparing the modern human’s genome to that of the Neanderthal has great value.
Humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor with chimpanzees — our next closest mammalian relative — that goes back between five and seven million years. Comparing the human genome with that of chimps tells us a lot about evolution over millions of years. But by having the Neanderthal genome sequence — now 55 percent completed — and comparing that with modern humans, we can learn much more about evolutionary changes over the last 30,000 years.
It may be that the DNA of other prehistoric human groups also are intermixed in our own DNA. Much like with Neanderthals, scientists extracted ancient DNA from the skeletal remains of another ancient cousin known as the Denisovans. The remains — a finger bone — were found in a cave in Siberia and showed that Denisovans were cousins of Neanderthals. They lived in Asia and disappeared about 40,000 years ago. Their DNA is found today in Melanesians.
As for the comparisons with the Neanderthals, so far, Pääbo’s team has found almost 80 genetic variants that are unique to modern humans. The function of these variants could help us understand what distinguishes us from Neanderthal.
Apparently Pääbo’s work has also resonated beyond the scientific community as well. At a talk late last year, Pääbo told a group of neuroscientists that for months he’s been keeping emails from people who have claimed that they were Neanderthal and should be included in his study. Several women have written to him volunteering their husbands as subjects for study.
Got Neanderthal DNA?
23andMe customers can find their inner Neanderthal or at least how much Neanderthal DNA they have at 23andMe Ancestry Labs. Not yet a customer? Visit our store!
Replies
Neanderthals were large-bodied hunter-gatherers, named after the German valley where their bones were first discovered, who roamed Europe and parts of Asia from 400,000 years ago until about 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal genome shepherded by Svante Pbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany indicates that their evolutionary story began to split from the lineage of modern humans less than half a million years ago, when their common ancestor (the chimpanzee) lived in Africa (see \'The human strain\').
In December last year, Pbo\'s team released the genetic blueprint of another population of ancient humans unlike ourselves or the Neanderthals that was based on DNA recovered from a 30,00050,000-year-old finger bone found in a cave in Denisova in southern Siberia.
Palaeoanthropologists call these groups archaic humans, distinguishing them from
modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa only around 200,000 years ago.
Inspired,
McLean discovered that Neanderthals, like humans, lacked a stretch of DNA that orchestrates the growth of spines on the penises in other primates
kind of cool to view the earth/africa -- all trees and grass and blue water and running about in the body of a chimpanzee. wow! hmmmm? so seven million years ago, SEVEN MILLION hard to comprehend this was all here 7 million years ago up to 500,000 years ago we were chimpanzees, and then a change took place, we lost our hair, moved somewhere, started walking on TWO feet, homo erectus and from 500,000 years ago to 400,000 years ago there were neanderthals walking around who came from all of this.
(the mystery is homo sapiens also come from all this BUT homo sapiens didn\'t emerge from africa until 200,000 years ago...so a different strain of chimpanzee, somewhere else in africa, losing its hair and discovering the ability to walk on two feet?)
i knew humans are a SUB-GROUP of the chimpanzee i remember that from science class in high school-- a lot of people don\'t like that, they prefer to think humans are THE main group and everything else is a subgroup of human, which isn\'t the case at all.
Dinosauria existed before all of this, first appearing during the Triassic period, approximately 230 million years ago. Dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates on Planet Earth for 135 million years.
From the beginning of the Jurassic (about 200 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous (66 million years ago), when the CretaceousPaleogene extinction event led to the extinction of most dinosaur groups at the close of the Mesozoic Era.
Fossil record indicates that BIRDS are the descendants of dinosaurs. Birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassic Period and, consequently, birds are a subgroup of dinosaurs in most modern classification systems as are CROCODILES from another group of dinosaurs.
Some birds survived the extinction event that occurred 66 million years ago, and their descendants continue the dinosaur lineage to the present day.
Birds which are a type of dinosaur show that dinosaurs in general are not, in fact, \"extinct\" as is commonly stated.
However, all non-avian dinosaurs as well as many groups of birds did suddenly become extinct approximately 66 million years ago. Many other groups of animals also became extinct at this time, including ammonites (nautilus-like mollusks), mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and many groups of mammals. This mass extinction is known as the CretaceousPaleogene extinction event. The nature of the event that caused this mass extinction has been extensively studied since the 1970s
At the peak of the Mesozoic, there were no polar ice caps, and sea levels are estimated to have been from 100 to 250 meters (300 to 800 ft) higher than they are today. The planet\'s temperature was also much more uniform, with only 25 C (45 F) separating average polar temperatures from those at the equator. On average, atmospheric temperatures were also much higher; the poles, for example, were 50 C (90 F) warmer than today.[124][125]
The atmosphere\'s composition during the Mesozoic is a matter for debate. While some academics argue that oxygen levels were much higher than today (the air we breathe today is made up predominantly of NITROGEN). Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Biological adaptations seen in birds and dinosaurs indicate that respiratory systems evolved beyond what would be necessary if oxygen levels were high.[126] By the late Cretaceous, the environment was changing dramatically. Volcanic activity was decreasing, which led to a cooling trend as levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide dropped. Oxygen levels in the atmosphere also started to fluctuate and would ultimately fall considerably. Some scientists hypothesize that climate change, combined with lower oxygen levels, might have led directly to the demise of many species.
If the dinosaurs had respiratory systems similar to those commonly found in modern birds, it may have been particularly difficult for them to cope with reduced respiratory efficiency, given the enormous oxygen demands of their very large bodies.
much of what was alive 66 million years ago SUFFOCATED when the earth\'s climate changed.
homo sapiens have only been around 200,000 years and we are already killing each other off and creating total chaos. i don\'t think humans will be the dominant species for 125 million years like the dinosaur. i think the roaches are going to take over.
interesting that the dominant inhabitants of planet earth keep getting smaller. wonder if there are microscopic \"civilizations\" on other planets and we just don\'t \"see\" them.
Thanks for this interesting journal.
now i\'m wondering what the earth looked like from 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs died off to 400,000 years ago when neanderthals evolved from chimpanzees...were chimpanzees around DURING dinosaurs in some form? they would have to be wouldn\'t they? what did it all look like?
i\'ve also heard that grass and all that is on the ground and on the trees was turquoise and purple as there was no chlorophyll, that is from some science magazine and they had a painting...so cool. also the sky wasn\'t blue it was pink.....even cooler. lol.
I always knew my husband was an animal! LOL....No seriously, amazing info here, 79! I never heard any of the history presented here. Cool stuff.
And imagine if the scky really was pink....and grass purple. History...either this is all true, or somebody\'s done some acid.
Amazing info. Thanks for the post! xoxo
they didn\'t know a lot of it until the 70\'s until now. a lot of it they just discovered in the passed ten years.
Sooo interesting!!!!
Thinking that many of the Christian\'s and Bible reader\'s here will not appreciate this post. :-)
yeah, i know. i thought of that when i posted it. i put one up about t-day and christmas every year as well and i know it hits a nerve...but fact is always better than fantasy and \"the truth shall set you free.\" totally amazes me when people prefer to believe that life on earth began 3500 years ago because that was when the old testament was written....hmmmm what about all the other religions that existed and were WRITTEN before that. there are like 100,000 religions out there, and those are just the ones we know about.