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:

---

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

​

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.

​

"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."

---

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).

Thread copied here from the 40k-Year-Old Man Had Recent Neanderthal Ancestor thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I don't see how this adds any support to a Multiregional model or is in anyway in conflict with the Out of Africa model.

I can live with that.

I don't see how a population of H. neanderthalensis known to exist at 35k years ago and a population of H. sapiens known to be in the same region at the time conflicts with Out-Of-Africa. What this evidence shows is that the gene flow between the populations may have continued more recently than previously hypothesized.The question now is why, with such recent crossings, is there not more neanderthal DNA in present sapiens populations. Maybe girls back then just didn't like the bad-boy neanderthal look all that much. Couldn't have been the other way because, lets face it, those neanderthal girls were just plain ugly ... with a capital U.Edited by AZPaul3, : splng

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.

The folks at the Max Planck Institute have been doing awesome research into ancient DNA. And the technology is improving all the time!This sure beats measuring bones, as we used to have to do a couple of decades ago to try and determine relationships.

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

True.I got some good results measuring bones a few decades ago as part of my Ph.D. work. I used a good multivariate stat and had a decent sample size, and lots of variables.So far DNA analysis in the same area is confusing, in part because it is much more detailed and because the sample size is still small. It takes a while to figure out what's going on.But I think we'll eventually get more information from DNA than measuring bones--which is good!

Of course, there is no way that could be known.Whether this sort of thing is considered as disproving an OOA model depends on exactly what you mean by 'out-of-Africa'. The idea of total replacement has been pretty convincingly disproven by the genetic evidence that we do carry genes from many archaic, non-African populations.But whilst this extreme version of out of Africa is disproved by the genetic evidence, so is the extreme version of the multiregional hypothesis, since modern populations in Europe and Asia seem to have inherited only a minority of their genes from the middle Palaeolithic inhabitants of Europe and Asia. It looks like there was a population expansion from Africa, but that the expanding population interbred with local populations. The genetic signature of these archaic populations was mostly swamped by the expanding Africans - except for a few genes, most of which presumably were locally adaptive.

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that humans stopped screwing around just because they left Africa. I remember seeing a cave wall that said "What happened in Romania stays in Romania."I don't think anyone has thought that emerging humans didn't screw anyone they found along their road trips.

Several people have argued that there was no interbreeding between the recent emigrants from Africa and archaic humans elsewhere, and this is not just an old-fashioned view - some still argue in favour of the idea today. Here's an article from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from as recent as 2011 arguing that the apparent sign of Neanderthal DNA in non-African populations is better explained by ancient African population structure than interbreeding.ABE: On further thought, I'm willing to concede you're probably right about this. I was trying to find a clear statement from supporters of the total replacement model, but the most confident claims that there was no admixture go more like this:

quote:

---

We indeed show that the absence of Neanderthal mtDNA sequences in Europe is compatible with at most 120 admixture events between the two populations despite a likely cohabitation time of more than 12,000 y. This extremely low number strongly suggests an almost complete sterility between Neanderthal females and modern human males, implying that the two populations were probably distinct biological species.

---

So I guess it's not really a claim that modern humans didn't get it on with archaic humans, but simply that they couldn't make babies (or not fertile ones at least)Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

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.

As I understand it the Neander head is larger than the Cro-magnon head, and this raises the possibility of increased death during childbirth for mother and child.Enjoy

Isn't that a different way of saying the same thing? That's a better way of saying what I was trying to say, though!