The Neanderthals may have died out 30,000 years ago, but scientists now believe their genes live on in modern man.
The New York Times has the story:
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.
Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.
Blah-blah-blah. Enough scientific stuff. Let’s get to the sex.
A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the two species overlapped there for some 15,000 years, from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.
We are highly-trained paleontologists and geneticists here at IHateTheMedia.com and we are absolutely convinced that Neanderthals still walk among us.
Getting elected to Congress. So easy a caveman could do it.
Source: New York Times
This post was last modified on May 8, 2010
View Comments (7)
LOL that is funny. It does seem that anyone can be a congress person as long as they are greedy enough.
So one species of humans mated with another species of humans...? eww. Those neanderthals were not sexy, especially if you take into consideration the picture above.
I think the guy in the photo is actually a troglodyte.
What does the moron from Florida have to say?
Unhh, unnhhh, uhnhnnn.......
Great, I can see it now. The Left will claim that those of us on the Right are the decended from the neanderthal and therefore not truly human. When was this type of logic used before? Oh yea! Now I remember. It was the late 1700's/early 1800's when "scientists" decleared that blacks were not human and the party that eventually became the democratic party(in part to distance themselves from their own dark history)decided to use said science to justify slavery of the blacks saying that they were merely property not much different than cattle. Oh and it happened again in the early 1900's when "science" was used to justify eugenics heavily supported by the "progressive party"(which returned to calling itself the democratic party to again distance itself from its dark past) and that same science was used by Hitler to claim that the Jews were not human. At the time of the "progressive era" the left openly praised and supported Hitler but of course now they desparately try to distance themselves from this by calling themselves "liberals" and trying to say falsely that Hitler was from the right.
Hmmmm. Do we know of any other organization that simply disbands itself only to re-emerge with a different name and distort the facts so they don't have to account for their dark history??/ ACORN perhaps? Oh, wait, I'm refering to leftists again.
You're probably right, drb, but don't worry because the animal rights people will defend us.
Absolutely. I do look forward to them to defend our rights to mate in private (and so on).
I feel sooooooo much beter now, thanks