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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (9738)	11/11/2010 2:02:04 PM
From: Solon	Respond to of 69300

The Neanderthals are a separate species termed a speciation event by biologists. Their lineages diverged about half a million years ago when the Neandertals high-tailed it out of Africa. After modern humans left Africa they mated with the Neanderthals to some degree. This was about 45,000 years ago. Thus did the Neanderthals contribute to the gene pool of many human races (but not to those remaining in Africa until after the Neanderthals went extinct). "We are still left with the question of whether Neandertals were members of our species or another species with whom we share a distant common ancestor. Two sources of evidence have shed light on this issue--DNA and bones. In 2009, a first draft of the Neandertal genome was completed. It consists of 60% of their approximately 3 billion DNA base units. They were sequenced mostly from bones found in Vindija Cave in Croatia. Based on this information, Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany concluded that the Neandertal and modern human genomes share 99.5-99.9% of their base unit sequences. He estimated that the Neandertal line began to diverge from ours by about 800,000 years ago and that we were "genetically distinct" by 300,000 years ago. Further analysis of the Vindija Cave Neandertal DNA by Richard Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz led him to announce in 2010 that 1-4% of the DNA in modern Europeans and Asians came from Neandertals. Therefore, he suggested that there must have been at least a small amount of interbreeding between modern humans and Neandertals around 80-50,000 years ago. This most likely occurred in Southwest Asia, shortly after modern humans migrated out of Africa. This would account for the lack of Neandertal DNA markers in African populations today." anthro.palomar.edu