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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (246343)	8/17/2005 1:41:12 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571991

RE"Neanderthals are not part of our ancestry? Can you tell I don't have a science background?" Much confusion about the history of our species stems from people mistaking the names of discrete skeletal remains with names of distinct species. In fact, the skeletal remains are derived from three distinct species in the genus Homo. The Peking Man and Java Man skeletons are both members of the Homo erectus species, thanks to new DNA evidence, the Neandertal Man skeleton is now classified as a member of the Homo neandertalis species, and the Cro-Magnon Man and Cheddar Man skeletons are members of the Homo sapiens species. Homo erectus was the ancestral species that gave rise to Homo sapiens and Homo neandertalis, two (probably unrelated) sister species. You and I and everyone else on earth are all members of the Homo sapiens species. The reason why the Homo erectus and Homo neandertalis species went extinct is a big mystery. Homo erectus had a smaller brain than Homo neandertalis or Homo sapiens, so members of that species might not have been able to keep up with the competition. But there seem to be some instances where all three species lived in the same place at the same time. All we really know is that for about 40,000 years, Homo sapiens has been the only species in the genus Homo. So no, we didn't evolve from Neandertal. Likely Cro-Magnon and neandertal co-existed but didn't cross breed very much. One explaination of why Neandertal extincted in that Cro-Magnon simply had a higher birthrate and displaced it. This could have happened in as little as 1000 years. It's my contention however, that Neantertal genes still exist today.

To: tejek who wrote (246343)	8/17/2005 10:16:50 AM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571991

Neanderthals are not part of our ancestry? Can you tell I don't have a science background? There is still some wiggle room. Only a portion of Neanderthal mitocondrial DNA (mDNA) was sequenced. Since mDNA passes down the maternal line without modification, if any living human was descended from a Neanderthal female, we would find modern human mDNA that should closely match this 25K year old Neanderthal mDNA. Unfortunately, the amount sequenced so far would seem to place the differences as two great. IIRC a plot of the differences has the distribution of humans, neanderthals & chimps forming distinct clusters with the human-neanderthal difference being about 20-30% of the human-chimp difference. There is some hope of sequencing actual neanderthal chromosomal DNA, but I don't know what stage that is at. It will be very interesting if this is successful, with implications for the creation/evolution debate, as currently creationists either lump neanderthals as human or ape, the world being necessarily binary in that regards form their POV. The genetics will place it somewhere in an island of its own, but closer to humans is my WAG based on the mDNA results so far.