All humans alive on this planet today came at some point out of Africa. But those who left Africa weren’t all the same brand. The ancestors of Neanderthals for example are estimated to have left Africa 400k to 800k years ago, and the last Neanderthals would have lived as recently as 30k years ago, and as we know, they inhabited Spain, France, Germany, and an area extending to what is today Russia. Well, there were modern homo sapiens in Europe at that time, who had left Africa 80k-50k years ago, so it has long been suspected that the 2 species would have met.(for any value of “met”)
Now new research confirms that non-African home sapiens are definetely “part Neanderthal”, in that they share part of their X chromosome with Neanderthals. That means you, and me :
Dr. Labuda and his team almost a decade ago had identified a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome that seemed different and whose origins they questioned. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, they quickly compared 6000 chromosomes from all parts of the world to the Neanderthal haplotype. The Neanderthal sequence was present in peoples across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia.
“There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals.”
Would they have looked like this next to us?
I wonder why they went extinct while homo sapiens went on to develop Abrahamic religions, ProActiv pimple remover and nuclear weapons.
Eco World Content From Across The Internet.
Featured on EcoPressed
Solar Mosaic, Kickstarter for solar aims high
