This Is A Neanderthal.

[Drew]

Eye Color and Hair Color may be inferred from DNA.

 

The same mutations which cause red-hair in modern humans can be found in Neandertal DNA.

 

 

I would recommend anyone truly interested in the science of Neandertal/Human relationship, but unwilling to scour Google Scholar for the sometimes difficult to read papers on the subject, to check out the John Hawks Weblog.

 

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/altai-neandertal-genome-2013.html

 

This is a good article about the Altai Neandertal.  At the top are keyword links to other Neandertal topics.

 

I asked Dr. Hawks when he thought the last Neandertal died out, and he said they never did.  In other words, they are us, we are them.

[norseman]

^^^^Not really.

 

Sure up to 4% of their DNA lives on in Eurasian Homo Sapiens...... that's not the same as having a living breathing Neanderthal standing among us.

 

But it does press the point that the differences between us and them in the larger scheme of things is minuscule.

[JDL]

That's because adaptabiliy and trainability are elements highly and positively correlated with intelligence, whereas education, the way our society now conducts it, is less positively correlated with intelligence.  An extreme example, our special education system generates educated graduates, but none that todays US Army would accept, so you, as an officer, never got the opportunity to lead and teach such folks.  In fact, I do believe the US military strictly screens volunteers on the basis of intelligence, directly or indirectly, such that you had a rather elite population to deal with.  Another example, society today pushes far more people into college that are nowhere near qualified to be there.  The result?  College costs increase as they must offer staff to try to keep the unqualified enrolled, many of the unqualified drop out, after making substantial unwise expenditures, and the value of a degree is diminished, because degrees not truly and honestly earned are now being granted.

 

Actually, in the early 80's we still had quite a few lower performing soldiers.  It wasn't that long after Viet Nam.

[Drew]

4% DNA living on in us after 100,000 years is a pretty good amount I would say.

Considering that the first offspring of a modern human and a Neandertal would have been around 50%.

[Guest Stan Norton]

Probably would've been exactly 50%! Yes, I'd say that the percentage of Neanderthal DNA is us today is a fair amount considering the timescale involved.

[Rockape]

4% DNA living on in us after 100,000 years is a pretty good amount I would say.

Considering that the first offspring of a modern human and a Neandertal would have been around 50%.

 

But isn't there a theory that the shared DNA could have come from a common ancestor for both Neandertal and Cro Magnon? That it doesn't mean Neandertal and Cro Magnon interbred?

[norseman]

4% DNA living on in us after 100,000 years is a pretty good amount I would say.

Considering that the first offspring of a modern human and a Neandertal would have been around 50%.

You need to cut your date by half at least, thal's went extinct 33k to 45k years ago.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

[Guest]

A lot of Cro Magnon and Neandertal genes are identical and interchangeable, enough to allow them to hybridize with some success.  But, yes, the first generation of hybrids would have received 50% of their genes from each parent.  If no further hybridization occurred, the second generation would have 25% Neandertal DNA, 12.5% in the 3rd generation, 6.25% in the 4th (within the estimated range of Neandertal genetic content of contemporary Eurasians), 3.125% in the 5th, 1.5625% in the 6th, and below the estimated range of today's Neandertal genetic content in the 7th.

 

Thus, a Eurasian might conclude (erroneously) that he had a great-great-great-great grandparent, a great-great grandparent, or somewhere in between that was a Neandertal.  Assuming 30 years per generation, that would mean a Neandertal was out and about only 120 to 180 years ago.  Obviously there was no Neandertal running around one to two centuries ago.  Instead, some relatively few of the Neandertal genes were beneficial and became incorporated into our species's genome.

 

In fact, some Neandertal genes were so beneficial that modern Eurasians, in their individual allotments of 1-4% Neandertal genes, have, as a whole, apparently preserved fully 20% of the Neandertal genome: 

Surprise! 20 Percent of Neanderthal Genome Lives On in Modern Humans, Scientists Find Two new studies suggest that the contribution from Neanderthal DNA was vital.

--http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140129-neanderthal-genes-genetics-migration-africa-eurasian-science/

Edited May 28, 2014 by Pteronarcyd

[Yuchi1]

IMO, the actual, real, scientific and beyond-a-doubt reason we have neanderthal DNA at such a present level...beer goggles! (both ways)

[southernyahoo]

I think it was one way Yuchi, since Neanderthal mtDNA has about 200 differences from modern man and are not in us today. This would suggest that no female off spring from a male cro mag and female Neanderthal cross lived and bred enough with cro magnon for that lineage to be present today. 

[Guest]

Actually any female born may have had only male offspring herself thereby eliminating her mtDNA from the gene pool.

[southernyahoo]

That's true

[Guest]

 Yes. As Norse says, yes. All these phenotypic traits with the exception of hair length are found within the genome or can at least be established within a set of reasoned parameters. Simple genetics. I think that because Neanderthals were so very close to us we can allow the artists a degree of freedom to speculate that the hair growth was roughly in similar places and of similar colours and form to ours. It's not like they gave them cat eyes or something...

 

If you want to be obsessively pedantic then no, the artists cannot know exactly what any set of bones looked like perfectly. However as the museum states and as I have repeated, the model is the best result we can possibly have using the latest scientific methods. If that still not good enough then what can I say? 

 

This abstract and study seem to contradict the notion that making predictions based on the genome is anything but "Simple genetics".

 

 

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v17/n8/full/ejhg20095a.html

 

"In the Victorian era, Sir Francis Galton showed that ‘when dealing with the transmission of stature from parents to children, the average height of the two parents, … is all we need care to know about them’ (1886). One hundred and twenty-two years after Galton's work was published, 54 loci showing strong statistical evidence for association to human height were described, providing us with potential genomic means of human height prediction. In a population-based study of 5748 people, we find that a 54-loci genomic profile explained 4–6% of the sex- and age-adjusted height variance, and had limited ability to discriminate tall/short people, as characterized by the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC). In a family-based study of 550 people, with both parents having height measurements, we find that the Galtonian mid-parental prediction method explained 40% of the sex- and age-adjusted height variance, and showed high discriminative accuracy."

[Guest Stan Norton]

They worked out neanderthal height from the bones.

Edited May 29, 2014 by Stan Norton

[AaronD]

How tall were the neanderthals then?