After years of sequencing the genomes of female Neandertals, researchers have finally got their first good look at the Y chromosome of a male Neandertal—and found that it is unlike that of any other Y in modern humans living today. Even though Neandertals and modern humans interbred several times in the past 100,000 years, the DNA on the Y chromosome from a male Neandertal who lived at El Sidrón, Spain, 49,000 years ago has not been passed onto modern humans, researchers report today in The American Journal of Human Genetics. The finding fits with earlier studies that have found that although living Asians and Europeans have inherited 1% to 3% of their DNA from their ancestors’ interbreeding with Neandertals, they are missing chunks of Neandertal DNA on their Y chromosomes. This has suggested that female modern humans and male Neandertals were not fully compatible and that male Neandertals may have had problems with sperm production. The new study finds a clue to why: The El Sidrón Neandertal had mutations in three immune genes, including one that produces antigens that can elicit an immune response in pregnant women, causing them to reject and miscarry male fetuses with those genes. So even though male Neandertals and female modern humans probably hooked up more than once over the ages, they may have been unable to produce many healthy male babies (such as the reconstruction of this Neandertal boy from fossils from Gibraltar)—and, thus, hastened the extinction of Neandertals. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016...ndertals-had-trouble-making-babies-here-s-why
I wonder why some people say neandertal and others say neanderthal? They're Homo neanderthalensis, not Homo neandertalensis.
we wrote about this once before. the more plausible explanation is that the h. sapiens sapiens would not allow the male neandertals to mate with their (h.s.s.) women. whereas the male h.s. sapiens did not mind mating with the h.s.neandertal women. they (male h.s.s.) likely raided the h.s. neandertal camps, killed the men (and maybe ate them), and had sex with the women. common human behavior back in the day. the offspring were always from the male h.s.s. having sex with the female h.s.neadertal, and not the other way around.
The modern word for "valley" in German is "Tal". This used to be spelled "Thal" so that place names retain their original spelling, and the valley of the river Neander is still Neanderthal, prounounced as "Neandertal" with a hard "t". Silver coins made in a place called Joachimsthal were called "Thaler", which by the way is the origin of the name "Dollar". I don't think that the "h" in Thaler was ever pronounced, it was always a hard "t" sound, hence the simpler spelling and explains why the USA currency is not the "thollar". Edit: Dang - cross-posted with above
Most of the major European languages underwent spelling reform in the 19th century. They wanted to increase the literacy rate among their people, as printed matter became ubiquitous and public education became more available. Italy was one of the first countries (or perhaps even the very first) to tackle this issue, because the various regions had distinct dialects that were transcribed in ways that made it a bit of a challenge for, say, a person from Florence to read a story or an article written in Rome. Since Florence was the literary capital of the region (Italy was not actually a united country yet), the Florentines took the lead in this effort. The Spaniards, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Germans, the Scandinavians and the various Slavic people all participated in this effort, with various levels of enthusiasm. Major exceptions include: English. England was a hodgepodge of dialects--even worse than it is today. "Received Pronunciation," the dialect of the royalty and upper-class Londoners, is acknowledged as the "standard" dialect of British English, despite the fact that only about 3% of the country's people actually speak it. (However, virtually everyone, even we Americans, can understand it with little or no difficulty.) To reform English spelling is a daunting project which few have tried and no one has succeeded. We're still spelling words the way they were pronounced during the era when the Norman French ruled England, added hundreds of French words to our vocabulary, and made our grammar and syntax almost bewildering. To reform English spelling now is a daunting project that no one can even plan, much less execute. French. This language is, arguably, in even worse condition than English. About one of every five letters is silent, and there is almost no consistency in the way sounds are transcribed. Worse yet, it underwent phonetic drift less than 200 years ago: this is when the letter combination OI came to be pronounced "WA." I don't know which language would be the most difficult to reform, but in both cases the effort is too daunting to attempt. Greek. Ironically, the country of Europe's earliest scholarship never tried to modernize their language's spelling, for the incredible reason that, until very recently, everything was written in ancient Greek. School children read the original writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are now taught to read and write the vernacular language--which is not as different from the ancient version as most European languages are. Anyone with a high-school education can read both the classics and today's newspaper. So, by comparison, it was a relatively easy task for Germans to modernize the spelling of their own language. Gutenberg got the country off to a good start by standardizing the spelling in sensible ways with his printing press. There hasn't been much left to do: primarily the use of umlauts and a very few odds and ends like removing the silent H from "th." It was the Kingdom of Bohemia (which we now call the Czech Republic) that minted the first "dollar" coin. They called it a Joachimsthaler. Other countries followed suit, including most of the Germanic-speaking countries (Sweden, Holland, etc.), as well as a few other Slavic countries, and surprisingly, Italy, Ethiopia and Persia. Since most of the Germanic peoples pronounced the word with a soft D instead of a hard T, "dollar" was the more common form of the word by the time the USA came into existence and needed a name for its currency.
