My cousin the Neanderthal

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by timojin, Oct 6, 2017.

  1. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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  3. Bells Staff Member

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    Did you not read the links I posted?

    Two independent teams of researchers investigating why East Asian people have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans have reached the same conclusion.
    They say the ancestors of Asians interbred with Neanderthals for a second time, and at a later date, giving them an extra dose of Neanderthal DNA
    .​

    That would be because they were a distinct species.

    You cannot argue this, and then declare:

    Neanderthals were a distinct species of hominids. Just because they could mate with other species of hominids and produce somewhat fertile offspring, does not mean that that distinction becomes 'blurred'. If you are arguing that Europeans are H. neanderthal, then you are arguing that Europeans (and ironically enough, you only peg Europeans and ignore all other ethnic groups who have H. neanderthal ancestry, if not more than Europeans do) are a different and distinct species.

    You have kind of bought into a fairly racist narrative who argue the same thing. That Europeans are distinct from other H. sapiens, because of the genetic injection of H. neanderthal genes, while completely ignoring that other regions saw a higher percentage of Neanderthal genes in their ancestry.

    Would you see a mule as being a product of evolution?

    You tell me. You are the one dipping your toes into two different pools, arguing that Europeans are Neanderthals while trying to deny Neanderthals were a distinct species, while arguing that Europeans are still H. sapiens.

    In the meantime, you'll just ignore issues of incompatibility, infertility and the fact that they were a distinct species with distinct differences.

    So you mean you... As a person of European descent?

    What about Asians who carry more Neanderthal DNA? They don't count in this equation? The people of the Pacific, who also carry Neanderthal DNA?

    Or even me? Or do you believe that my African ancestry has watered down my European ancestry too much to count as "we"?

    More to the point, why do you push the European line more than any other?

    Not really.

    We are more genetically similar to each other, than we are to H. neanderthals. What does that tell you?

    You don't know that.

    Aren't you curious as to why the Y chromosome was never passed on?

    There is no evidence to support that. Just speculation and imagination.
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I accept that. So what? The same things I've been saying about Neanderthals in Europe apply to them in Asia under slightly different circumstances.
    Yes it does literally mean that.
    I'm not arguing that Europeans are exclusively Neanderthal, they are also a product of other migrations.
    The racism is entirely your interpretation. Europeans are distinct due to being the product of a unique mix of Neanderthal and other genes. Other gene flows happened in other places, making them also unique. The Asian/ Neanderthal combination is also unique, but Europeans seem to have retained a larger percentage of some Neanderthal genes.

    Europeans have three times more Neanderthal genes for lipid catabolism than Asians or Africans


    Mules aren't fertile, so they are a dead end.
    Correct, because our definition of species is of limited utility when describing classifications that blur and morph, which is the true story of the tree of evolution.
    As long as they produced any fertile offspring, what I've said is true.
    I'm Eastern European Jewish, so that's probably a different story.
    That's where you find the most Neanderthal remains.
    The intermixing wasn't total. Neanderthal genes don't seem to be highly adaptive given the environment.
    It's a logical assumption.
    Yes.

     
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  7. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Actually, having this frequent interbreeding shows they are a distinct race, not a distinct species. Moreover, as noted before, they began interbreeding with H. s. sapiens circa 150 KYA, having only about 200 KYA of separation, not usually long enough to form a new species when the age of maturity is about 20 years (only 10,000 generations)

    We say that horses and donkeys are separate species because a) they look vastly different, and b) the product of their mating (mule) is almost always sterile and does not contribute to either the horse or donkey-gene pool, and they are separated by millions of generations. This is not true with neanderthals.

    As to why the neanderthal Y is not present in modern men, clearly it is because they did not sire sons that lived to produce extant progeny.

    You say there is no 'evidence' that H.s. sapiens raided neanderthal camps, killing the males, capturing the females, but that is exactly what the evidence points to.

    No neanderthal Y, so the males were killed and did not successfully mate with H.s. sapien females with male progeny; and the neanderthal females that were captured by the sapien males had their sons raised to maturity (injecting neanderthal DNA into the gene-pool), but the females were not allowed to reproduce, eliminating the mtDNA that is passed only from the maternal line.

    Or do you have a more viable suggestion for those two salient facts, which is indeed 'evidence' in support of this suggestion?
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2017
  8. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Define "race", please.
     
  9. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Different family of interbreeding specie ?
     
  10. Bells Staff Member

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    But that is not what you have been saying about other populations with Neanderthal DNA.. Even those who have a much larger portion of Neanderthal DNA compared to Europeans.

    No it doesn't.

    No, you are arguing for exclusivity, while trying to 'blur' the line of what constitutes a species..

    The irony of what you linked is that you have been arguing they are not extinct and the first sentence of the article that you linked:

    Although Neanderthals are extinct, fragments of their genomes persist in modern humans.

    Moving on, what DNA people have from Neanderthals actually varies. While Europeans have a larger percentage of some genes, others will have a larger percentage of another type of Neanderthal genes. Hence why the article stated that it varies.

    And again, you are arguing that Europeans are somehow distinct because of that Neanderthal DNA, in a thread started by the guy who is arguing that Europeans are distinct and superior because of their Neanderthal DNA..

    Let me ask you the question this way..

    Do you think H. sapiens would have still been 'modern Europeans' without the injection of Neanderthal DNA?

    Actually, like the hybrid of Neanderthals and modern humans, some females are fertile but males are not. And have produced offspring if the female mule mates with a pure bred horse or donkey.

    There are no recorded cases of fertile mule stallions. A few mare mules have produced offspring when mated with a purebred horse or donkey.[16][17] Herodotus gives an account of such an event as an ill omen of Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BC: "There happened also a portent of another kind while he was still at Sardis,—a mule brought forth young and gave birth to a mule" (Herodotus The Histories 7:57), and a mule's giving birth was a frequently recorded portent in antiquity, although scientific writers also doubted whether the thing was really possible (see e.g. Aristotle, Historia animalium, 6.24; Varro, De re rustica, 2.1.28).

    As of October 2002, there had been only 60 documented cases of mules birthing foals since 1527.[17] In China in 2001, a mare mule produced a filly.[18] In Morocco in early 2002 and Colorado in 2007, mare mules produced colts.[17][19][20] Blood and hair samples from the Colorado birth verified that the mother was indeed a mule and the foal was indeed her offspring.[20]

    A 1939 article in the Journal of Heredity describes two offspring of a fertile mare mule named "Old Bec", which was owned at the time by the A&M College of Texas (now Texas A&M University) in the late 1920s. One of the foals was a female, sired by a jack. Unlike its mother, it was sterile. The other, sired by a five-gaited Saddlebred stallion, exhibited no characteristics of any donkey. That horse, a stallion, was bred to several mares, which gave birth to live foals that showed no characteristics of the donkey.

    So, is a mule a product of evolution, given that the female (and not the male), like the female offspring of Neanderthal/modern human hybrids (and again, not the male), could be fertile?

    Let's just throw out all the books altogether?

    But you declared the mule to be a "dead end"..

    And?

    Didn't you say before that it is the DNA that does not lie? Why do you ignore the higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA in Asians and focus so much on Europeans, despite the fact that the Asian population clearly shows more mating events than for that of the European population?

    That doesn't make sense to me.

    And yet you believe that Neanderthals evolved in the 'intermixing' to become modern Europeans..

    No actually, it isn't. While they may have fought, going one step further and heading to 'our males store their females for breeding purposes', which is essentially what Walter argued, seemed a tad far fetched. There is no evidence of this.

    Makes for a good story though.
     
  11. Bells Staff Member

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    Aaannnnddd here we go..

    Can you please provide scientific proof of "race"? Like a study or something that determines that the injection of Neanderthal genes into certain populations somehow or other made them a "distinct race"?

    Studies found that the differentiation between the two was quite distinct, which is why genetically, there are so many issues of incompatibility.

    How do you know their fertile offspring do not contribute to the horse or donkey gene-pool?

    Actually no. Studies have found that the male offspring were more than likely not compatible with human females, leading to miscarriages.

    The evidence points to hybrid males not being born at all, because something in the developing male triggered an immune response in the female..

    And it has nothing to do with raiding parties killing off the baby boys and males.

    My god, the story becomes even more surreal.

    I have produced many links to explain why there is no Y chromosome. It would help if you actually read some of them instead of coming up with fantastic stories that completely ignore all that is known scientifically.
     
  12. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Why is that true?
     
  13. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Actually, I read the links. They ignored the obvious explanation (which I postulated above) and instead conjectured an 'immune response' which is not substantiated in the least by evidence (i.e. their conclusion was that there was possibly an 'immune response' rejection without evidence to support that conjecture, which you have now raised to the status of "evidence").

    I commented before that they ignored the obvious explanation, likely due to sociological blinders that it is not 'nice' to talk about killing of babies, and capturing/raping of females, when it is definitely part of our collective history.
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    If there should be one takeaway from what I'm saying, it's that the concept of species is a human invention. The only lines are the ones we define.
     
  15. Bells Staff Member

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    Then you did not read the links or understood what those studies found. For example:

    Further analysis revealed that genetic mutations might explain why this Neanderthal Y chromosome was lost in modern humans. Three mutations seen on this chromosome generate molecules that can trigger immune responses from women during pregnancy that can lead to miscarriages, and two of these three mutations are unique to Neanderthals.

    The researchers suggest that such genetic incompatibilities between Neanderthals and modern humans may have helped drive these lineages apart by discouraging interbreeding between them
    .​

    But we'll just ignore the science and go with our imagination instead.

    While ignoring the fact that they have not found any Neanderthal female bones with H. sapiens bones that would suggest some kind of sexual slavery.

    Is it possible it happened? Yes. But until we see some proof of that, it's better to not start dreaming up scenarios based on 'what if's'..
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Then quit using the term "species" in such an inconvenient, confused way, one that conflicts with the meaning and usage of the word in almost any scientific reader's mind that happens to encounter this thread.
    What we know today as a "European type" came along much later, not necessarily in Europe in the first place, and probably not as a part of this crossbreeding sequence.
     
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  17. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, that is exactly what I read. "might" and "may have" is pure speculation, not evidence. It is a "what if" scenario. Is it impossible - no; is it improbable - yes.

    I believe my explanation better supports the facts, as it is well within the range of human behavior, and indeed very plausible. Even modern sapiens in recent history (and indeed, even in the 21st century) would engage in tribal raids, killing the men of the other tribe, and taking their women. The conquering tribe's women would almost certainly not want competing females born from any such unions to be around thereafter; whereas since they were male-dominated tribes, the male babies would have had a good chance of surviving to maturity.

    That is not to say that the 'what if' "immune response leading to spontaneous abortion" scenario is impossible, but absent any evidence that such takes place, it appears highly speculative.
     
  18. Bells Staff Member

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    It is actually more probable than what you proposed.

    And with very good reason..

    See, there is a little kink with your proposal.

    No evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans.​

    This means that in all likelihood, from what we know thus far, it was H. sapiens females mating with male H. neanderthal. Does not mean it did not go the other way as well, but there is no genetic evidence to support that as yet.

    Could raids have happened? Yes. There are a variety of ways these breeding events could have occurred. But as yet, we don't know yet. So I would prefer if we stuck to what we have evidence for than to think up scenarios about conquering tribes and taking their women.
     
  19. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    It's confused in science itself. Maybe we need to recognize that fact.

    "...the fact that their DNA mixed with ours, and is only being selected out of thousands of generations, indicates that some form of hybrid incompatibility was not apparent. These analyses are extreme fine-tuning, only visible through the microscope of statistical inspection of DNA sequences. And they most certainly do not suggest that Neanderthals were a separate species."
    A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes
    by Adam Rutherford

    Some things happened later, some things happened sooner.
     
    Last edited: Oct 11, 2017
  20. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    breeding populations
    instead of species?

    meanwhile
    Perhaps is is rapid and radical climate change that has accelerated our evolution via mutation?
    Homo appeared at the dawn of this iceage. In the early days, we had a 40,000 year glacial cycle with rapid climate change being the norm. That lasted until the dawn of Heidelbergensis. During that time, we saw the most rapid increase in brain size until it topped out with heidelbergensis at 1800 cm. After which, the glacial cycles became longer and more stable with about a 100,000 year cycle.
    [edit: as/re 40,000 year glacial cycle perhaps I should have posted warm and cold cycle, as there seems to be evidence from lake elgygytgyn that the first million years of this ice age were without northern hemispheric glaciers...]
    ............
    If evolution is a collection of mutations.
    Then we should look at the three near extinction events of the last 1.2 million years. During these genetic bottlenecks our numbers may have gone into the low thousands if not hundreds.

    Inbreeding and genetic drift: Low populations lead to inbreeding which leads to genetic drift.
    It just might be that as each defined population(sapiens, neanderthalensis, denisovan, etc(?), evolved via mutations, that we were not always one big breeding population. As the survivors emerged from the refuges, they most likely hooked up though perhaps not always successfully.

    circa 430,000 years ago(during the most recent super-interglacial) we find Heidelbergensis, Proto Neanderthalensis, and Denisovans all at the same place at toughly the same time.


    (justathought)
    see:
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ge-may-have-shaped-human-evolution-180952885/
     
    Last edited: Oct 11, 2017
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That's no excuse for confusing ourselves here.
    The crossbreeding with Neandertals happened sooner, and the emergence of the current "European type" happened later. At least, that's what the data indicate.
    That's the standard explanation at the moment.
    Although our evolution was not all that unusually rapid (on the high end of normal).
     
  22. Walter L. Wagner Cosmic Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. H.S. neanderthal and H.S. sapien appear to have been highly compatible co-breeders. The high (average around 2-3%) amount of neanderthal DNA in extant sapiens in their original range (Eurasia) indicates that they had extensive mating contacts over prolonged periods of time, between several distinctive races (including denisovan, and likely others as distinctive).

    This would not have been like modern times (circa 2017), where different 'races' (actually, not really races along the lines of sapien and neanderthal being different races of the same species) are living right next door to each other in harmony (much of the time, anyway, sadly not always), with sociological acceptance of inter-'racial' marrying by the vast majority of the sapien community (some exceptions). Rather peoples were highly tribal, and kept to their tribes (each race had many tribes). It does not seem plausible that neanderthal and sapien 'married' and settled down with the in-laws in one big sapien-neanderthal community. And it does not seem plausible that the dominant race (sapien) would have allowed the far-less-dominant race (neanderthal) to take and marry sapien women, as Bells suggests. The sapien men would not have allowed it, if more modern sapien culture involving a dominant 'race' and non-dominant 'race' is any indication (and it is a strong indicator of past culture). Conversely, sapien men taking a second (or third, etc.) neanderthal woman as a breeding partner would have likely been socially acceptable in the sapien community, so long as only the male babies were allowed to live. Bells' scenario simply does not make sociological sense, and has a bare minimum of 'evidence' to support it. Occam's razor looks for the simplest and most obvious explanation.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    They appear to have been only marginally fertile, producing viable and fertile offspring of only some kinds from only some combinations.
    The great majority of human tribes outbreed extensively, and humans are among the most enthusiastic and far-reaching of outbreeding mammals - gene flow in humans has routinely traversed hundreds of kilometers per generation.
    Until the great European colonizations, there were no human races - racial categorization was invented about three hundred years ago by European colonial powers.
    Why do you assume the sapiens were dominant during the crossbreeding interval? The data indicates the reverse, if anything. Occam's Razor.
     

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