Who Are You Calling a Neanderthal?
Next time you call someone a Neanderthal for cutting off your car in traffic, you may not be guilty of hyperbole.
University of New Mexico genetic anthropologist Jeffrey Long led a group of researchers which investigated DNA samples from 1,983 people from around the world. His conclusion: there is a little bit of Neanderthal left over in nearly all of us.
Long says that interbreeding between humans and extinct human species such as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo heidelbergensis took place at two distinct historical periods.
PhysOrg.com has the full write-up:
The subjects of the study were drawn from 99 population groups in the Americas, Oceania, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the researchers analyzed over 600 microsatellite positions on the genome, which are sections that can be used rather like fingerprints. Doctoral student Sarah Joyce then developed an evolutionary tree to explain the genetic variations found in the microsatellite positions.
The results were unexpected, but Joyce said the best explanation for the variations was that our human ancestors and the archaic species interbred during two periods after the first Homo Sapiens had left Africa: the first in the Mediterranean around 60,000 years ago, and the second in eastern Asia about 45,000 years ago. The group found no evidence of the interbreeding in the DNA of modern Africans included in the study. The findings suggest that after the first interbreeding populations migrated from the Mediterranean to North America, Europe and Asia. A second interbreeding in Asia then altered the genome of the people who went on to migrate to Oceania.