What the heck does DNA tell us? About "Neanderthal man" ?? Are you a bit of them?

If your an African American chances are you have none, one, DNA of the "big brained" Neanderthal man. Your out of the loop!

Why is that? The enigmatic Denisovans, might be the key!! It seems that DNA testing through out different (present humans) tell us that all but, African americans have the Neanderthal gene..(DNA)...does this mean that certain human progenitors made things into what we see today?

Think of the "Cargo Cult", is the trope when a group of people worship an object as gods or deities. This usually happens either because of its advanced technology.

Neanderthal people had a very large brain. There speech was limited. But...when they mated with (non-African) human types...things got cooking.

Lots of new things are coming out on this stuff. China has a whole study going down.

I think we will be surprised.

reply to post by RUFFREADY


Red Deer Cave people representing a new evolutionary line...

"They could be a new evolutionary line or a previously unknown modern human population that arrived early from Africa and failed to contribute genetically to living east Asians,"

What does that mean...

"The discovery of the Red Deer Cave people shows just how complicated and interesting human evolutionary history was in Asia right at the end of the ice age. We had multiple populations living in the area, probably representing different evolutionary lines: the Red Deer Cave people on the East Asian continent, Homo floresiensis, or the 'Hobbit', on the island of Flores in Indonesia, and modern humans widely dispersed from northeast Asia to Australia. This paints an amazing picture of diversity, one we had no clue about until this last decade,"

"There might be another possible explanation for the more archaic features. Could these alternatively be attributed to gene flow from a more archaic population that survived alongside modern humans? In the case of the Longlin Cave and Maludong fossils, the most likely candidate would be the enigmatic Denisovans who apparently interbred with the ancestors of modern Australasians somewhere in south east Asia. Could these Chinese fossils be further evidence of such hybridisation?"

Big Giant Head – Evolution of the Human Brain

Why was Neanderthals brain bigger than ours??

Once upon a time, some thousands of generations ago, a threshold was crossed. Somewhere in the evolutionary backwoods of the brain, something unprecedented happened in the story of life on Earth. The human brain changed and was suddenly able to compute, manage and store information like never before. Why did this happen? Scientists think they have found the answer.

It happened. And it was mixed DNA it seems.

reply to post by RUFFREADY


We carry only about 4% neanderthal DNA; it's a very small amount. They had a much better developed visual cortex and could apparently think three dimensionally (in regards to their cave art, they would use the terrain to best express an animal; i.e. a bulge in the cave wall would be used to paint an animal's body), and appear to have been kinder and gentler than homo sapiens sapiens. They also had a very strong sense of smell compared to us, as they had more bones in their nose.

They failed the test of evolution so, I can understand why they're DNA is just a 'ghost' in modern man. I don't think it really matters, they served they're pupose and were made obsolete by superior creatures.
The final iteration of the human lineage that we see now will hopefuly get us off this planet, and SOON !, Neanderthal would never have been able to do that. Of course, if we wipe ourselves out, no one will ever know, and the only thing any wayward travelers will be able to learn about the dominant life form on this planet will come from a LP record cut by Carl Sagan!

Interbreeding With Neanderthals

Telltale evidence of ancient liaisons with Neanderthals and other extinct human relatives can be found in the DNA of billions of people.

The above is from an article from "Discover Magazine".. a must read discovermagazine.com...

"New Revelations From DNA

When Reich entered college, in 1992, most of what scientists knew about human evolution came from fossils. The emerging consensus was that Homo sapiens evolved only in Africa. Humans then migrated to the other continents, where they lived for a time alongside humanlike relatives known as hominins.

Paleoanthropologists who supported this “out-of-Africa” model argued that Neanderthals, although they ranged over much of Europe, did not give rise to today’s Europeans. Instead, they evolved separately from an ancient hominin and then, about 30,000 years ago, disappeared. Today’s Europeans are not latter-day Neanderthals but African immigrants."

Key here...
"They found that all the different mitochondrial DNA in living humans descended from a common ancestor who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago, a woman who was nicknamed “mitochondrial Eve.”


BUT!!!

"Detecting these signs is not easy. Imagine that two people from very distant parts of the world—a woman from Spain, say, and a man from Polynesia—get married and have a girl. She is born with 23 pairs of chromosomes: one set from her mother and one from her father. Her mother’s chromosomes are loaded with genetic markers that pinpoint her Spanish heritage. Likewise, her father’s DNA is unmistakably Polynesian. But as the girl’s own eggs develop, her DNA gets mixed up."

"To do so, Reich had to reconstruct the genetic history of African Americans, who came to the United States as slaves beginning in the 17th century. White owners sometimes had sex with their slaves and fathered children, thereby introducing European genes into the African American population. Freed slaves also had children with Native Americans and Latinos. As a result, African Americans today may have up to 80 percent European DNA."

The Neaderthal Within Us

"Chunks of Neanderthal DNA turned out to be more similar to the corresponding chunks of Europeans and Asians than they were to African DNA. On the other hand, in no case did Africans and Neanderthals share similar versions of a gene, to the exclusion of other humans. Was it possible that Europeans and Asians had a little Neanderthal DNA after all?"

AND!!!Since Africans do not carry Neanderthal DNA, it would appear Neanderthals bred only with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians. One possibility is that when humans emerged out of Africa some 50,000 or more years ago, they encountered Neanderthals in the Near East. !!!"

Once humans and Neanderthals mated, the humans continued to expand into Europe and Asia, taking Neanderthal genes with them. Another possibility is that the interbreeding came later. Neanderthals lived across a vast range, from Spain to Russia. As humans came into contact with Neanderthals, they might have mated in several places.

The DNA of living Asians and Europeans was (on average) 2.5 percent Neanderthal.


Humans and Neanderthals did not merge into a single people, however; the 2.5 percent of Neanderthal DNA found in Asians and Europeans is a very small fraction. Mathias Currat and Laurent Excoffier, two Swiss geneticists, studied how much interbreeding would be necessary to end up with so little Neanderthal DNA in humans today. All it would take, they concluded, would be for a Neanderthal and a human to create a child once every 30 years.


Neat isn't it!! Now I should get in a cave with a nice cave girl. Hmmmm?

Homo Heidelbergensis

What about this group???

"Homo neanderthalensis retained most of the features of H. heidelbergensis after its divergent evolution. Although shorter, Neanderthals were more robust, had large brow-ridges, a slightly protruding face, and lack of prominent chin. With the possible exception of Cro-Magnon Man, they also had a larger brain than all other hominids. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, have the smallest brows of any known hominid, are tall and lanky, and have a flat face with a protruding chin. H. sapiens have a larger brain than H. heidelbergensis, and a smaller brain than H. neanderthalensis, on average.[citation needed] To date, H. sapiens is the only known hominid with a high forehead, flat face, and thin, flat brows."

Some folks think Homo Heidelbergensis
is still around...Bigfoot!!

"According to Lee R. Berger of the University of Witwatersrand, numerous fossil bones indicate some populations of Heidelbergensis were "giants" routinely over 2.13 m (7 ft) tall and inhabited South Africa between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago.[6]"

en.wikipedia.org...

Is there anywhere that you could send your DNA to get tested to see what % neanderthal you are.

that would be cool.

Skilluminati
Is there anywhere that you could send your DNA to get tested to see what % neanderthal you are.

that would be cool.

The National Geographic "genographic" Project does precisely this. I had mine done and it came back 2.4% Neanderthal, and 4.1% Denisovan.

As far as the size of the Neanderthal brain, yes, it was "bigger," but not by much and may be the result of a small sample size. There aren't that many Neanderthal skulls to measure, so the ones that have been measured may not represent an average at all. As you can see below, the sizes overlap.

H. neanderthalensis also had an average brain size of 1,450 cc with a range from 1,125cc to 1,750cc. The average modern H. sapiens brain size today is 1,330cc.

Source

My family actually did the genome mapping through Nat Geo. it was absolutely fascinating!! I highly recommend everyone do it. Expensive, but cool. And yes, my family is part Neanderthal. I'd have to look it up again and post exact percentages.
The coolest part is I visited Romania a year before we tested, and while I was there, I felt a strange connection with the people and the land. Then found out a year later, my family is most closely related to Romania on my moms side.