40k-Year-Old Man Had Recent Neanderthal Ancestor

Apparently a man who lived only forty thousand years ago had Neanderthal ancestors only a few generations back.

quote:

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"Early Man from Romania Had Close Neanderthal Relatives, DNA Shows" from L A Times:

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A new discovery, announced Monday in the journal Nature, adds a piece to the puzzle. DNA testing of an ancient jawbone has confirmed that a man who lived in Romania about 40,000 years ago descended from a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations — less than 200 years — before him.

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"To our amazement, this guy had three or four times more Neanderthal DNA than any modern human we had ever looked at," said Svante Paabo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and co-senior author of the Nature study. "This is the first time we can say it's dramatically more, and close in the family tree."

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Genetic evidence has been the basis of the OOA model of human origins and is usually considered standing in contrast to the physical evidence which supports the Multiregional model.But some of these new findings (see the other thread: New Type of Ancient Human FoundDescendants Live Today? ) show us that the genetic evidence, when considered in its entirety, is more likely going to end up supporting the MH model than it will the OOA model (which is now as full of holes as Swiss cheese).

I can live with that.

The issue of interbreeding was discussed in the other thread (linked to in the OP). But basically, the OOA tree model fails to account for the fact that while we carry recent African-origin genetic material we also carry genes of recent non-African origin, which is and always has been the MH position.The fact that this person's material didn't make it into today's gene pool also supports the MH explanation that the paucity of lineages outside of Africa results from lineage extinctions. According to the article, the individual in question is not an ancestor of any modern human populations.

It may beat it, but let's hope it doesn't replace it!

I assumed the article meant that no known sequences from today have the characteristics expected in an ancestor of this individual. I think you mean that modern populations in Europe and Asia seem to have preserved only a minority of their Neanderthal genes. Or they were just swamped by the expanding African genes...Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

I'm glad you think so. Because the difference is the essence of the difference between MH and OOA.MH explains the evolution/distribution of modern Homo sapiens as largely a product of gene movement.OOA explains the evolution/distribution of modern Homo sapiens as largely a product of people movement.Edited by Jon, : codes...

I think MH works fine with the observation that 95% of our genome is African while 5% is from sources outside of Africa.Where the theories differ is in explaining why that distribution exists. MH explains it as a result of African genes swamping non-African ones (the genes were superior, more numerous, etc.) with little need for the large population movements posited by OOA.MH works as an explanation for the genetic evidence, to be fair, OOA does too, but MH has the added benefit of explaining the physical evidence and matters such as regional continuity of completely random traits.

More than 90% of which genome? The fella in question wasn't 90% African.The 90% African distribution is the result of millennia of gene flow out of Africa. Whether the dominance of African genes was brought about by migration or breeding, the evidence rather suggests that the African genes were anything but 'neutral'they're the genes that won.

No; I am 'proposing' (actually just repeating what countless scientists have proposed) a continual expansion of African genes. It's not. It's messy and complicated like real life. The African genes were clearly superior; both theories recognize this fact.