From The BBC Archaeology: How did the last Neanderthals live?

[abqtommy]

This is an interesting and lengthy article with my 4 paragraphs selected below...

snipetty-snip

"In fact, as the University of Colorado Boulder’s Paola Villa put it in a review, they were much like us: we need to dispel "the modern human superiority complex". This is strengthened by genetic insights. Not only do we share 99.5% of the same DNA, we still carry some Neanderthal DNA today.

That’s because when we arrived into Europe from Africa, we met each other several times and interbred with them. All individuals outside of Africa still carry evidence of this prehistoric mingling. I discovered a few years ago that I have 2.5% Neanderthal DNA. There’s a lot of it out there – across thousands of individuals, researchers have identified a combined total of 20% Neanderthal DNA in modern humans today.

Discoveries at Gorham’s cave have helped give us many more insights like these, especially about their last years on Earth.

Remains from the cave suggest that they exploited seafood and marine mammals. This is unsurprising given new evidence published in January 2020 that suggests they could swim. There is even evidence that they hunted dolphins, says Clive Finlayson. How they did so remains unclear, but we do know they hunted – or scavenged – large game like woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, deer and ibex."

Much more text plus photos at link:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200128-how-did-the-last-neanderthals-live

I enjoy reading articles like this. It helps me establish some understanding and perspective.

[Towlie]

1. There are a lot of other threads of this type in the Anthropology forum.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1229

[abqtommy]

10. Thanks. I avoid posting in specific forums due to the fact that I have too often been denied

permissions to post in them.

[malaise]

2. Makes me reinforce my belief that all racists are morons

We are all mixed up.

[Tommymac]

3. It's all mixed up.

[malaise]

4. Nice

Happy Holidays

[cate94]

7. We are

I was in Ireland a few years back, in a library. My sister was trying to find ancestors and I was reading about the purposeful starvation of the Irish by the Brits, in newspapers from that time. Mind boggling.
Most of my ancestors are Irish, but my DNA results could not tell the difference between Irish and British. Oh, except the fact that on my matrilineal line I am related to King Richard....?

Then there is my MIL. She is clearly a racist, most of her DNA is Iberian, but 2% turned out to be African. I got a real kick out of that.

We are all descendants of people who immigrated from Africa. Racism is stupid. Unless of course a person just wants to hate themselves.

[malaise]

12. Great post

Happy Holidays

[cate94]

29. Thanks!

Happy Holidays to you too!

[paleotn]

21. Very well said....

As a species, we're quite inbred, compared to even our closest relatives. Two humans chosen at random are much closer to each other genetically than two randomly chosen chimpanzees. Thus, the bottleneck theory in human evolution. So, you are spot on. Racism is self hate.

[cate94]

30. Thanks!

[WinstonSmith4740]

11. I've come to believe nature intended the races to blend.

We NEED to mix it up.

We all know what happens when a gene pool gets too small. Among other horrors, you get Trump supporters. I teach high school in North Las Vegas, and have had lots of inter racial students over the last 15 years. Name the combination, I've had 'em. First of all, they tend to be bright, and secondly, they range from cute as hell to drop freaking dead gorgeous. It's almost like two genes pools that have never been mingled get together and create a masterpiece.

And in this regard, I honestly think it will get better...kids today have completely gotten past the whole race thing. For the most part, they really, really don't see color or race. Inter racial dating is the norm. If we don't totally fuck things up before they get to be leaders, the future is bright.

[malaise]

15. Agree 100%

Sadly as things get better assholes emerge to try and turn us back.
Despite that we continue to mix and mingle and love all people.
Happy Holidays

[PatrickforO]

14. LOL. It's true! I have a friend in my Noetic Sciences group who

has had a life of achievement - she earned a Ph.D., taught many years at the college level, became the Dean of a department, lectured, and wrote a book. Really smart.

Well...maybe not so much smart as wise. She is wise.

I'd rather be wise than just smart, for sure.

Anyway, we were talking one time about how the arc of history bends toward justice, and how our species seems to be in a race with time to learn to live with each other and with all other life on this earth, or else go extinct.

So, she said, "I think, after living into my seventies, that this is the planet of slow learners."

And, you know, that is one of those utterances that is good for an initial laugh, but you find yourself thinking about it time and again. Profound.

Yeah, lots of morons. I had another acquaintance who had what she called the AM theory of human life. She said most people are either assholes or morons, and the really dangerous ones are both. Those are the racists.

[malaise]

18. This is profound

"I think, after living into my seventies, that this is the planet of slow learners."

And that's the truth. Many folks are gullible and believe crap passed on by family, authority figures and religious institutions. Some are just too busy living or too lazy to research things for themselves. And then there are those who cannot read or write.
Happy Holidays

[PatrickforO]

34. You too. n/t

[safeinOhio]

19. Anthropologist do not use the term race.

I prefer bigot rather than racist. But, that's just me.

https://anthropology.net/2008/06/30/the-concept-of-race/

"Reason for Race, Not Justification

It is human nature to categorize things to make our reality more palatable. Also, it is a coping mechanism for status. Something as simple as the color of one’s skin can denote their position in a hierarchy and can save a conversation. One does not have to talk to someone to figure out their status if they can just look at them and know according to their skin color, hypothetically speaking. Now, I am not saying we all do this, but realize that ingrained within each one of us is our culture that society has presented to us since birth. I believe, no matter who you are looking at, you will make some sort of assumption or employ some sort of stereotype to that person. This may include race but more importantly hierarchy or status judgment.
Conclusion

The conception of race is truly in the eyes of the beholder. It depends on who is looking, judging, assuming and has little or nothing to do with biology but the history of a society that makes assumptions or stereotypes of people of darker skin to create a social hierarchy that is visible or easily identified. There is variation of skin colors depending on the region of one’s origin. But the emphasis put behind the skin is the creation of race. The emphasis that is put in place by a sociocultural system is where the interpretation and conception of race stems from. Race is just an idea and not a fact of inferiority."

[malaise]

22. True but racism is a very useful concept in both political science

and economics.

[safeinOhio]

27. It is, but I wonder if you could switch

the word "culture" for the word "race"? Or some other term might work better? Even the word racist would be based on a bell curve. One might fall anywhere on the curve, making them more racist or less racist. Then you have to draw a line on the curve to decide who is and isn't a racist. That's why I like the term bigot.

However, the term is useful, just not all that accurate.

[cate94]

37. I understand what you are saying

However, bigot is not a very specific term. There are racial bigots, LBGTQ bigots, religious bigots, etc. Some bigots encompass all types, and some do not. Race is a false construct based on color, and as you say, it truly is” not a fact of inferiority”. None of the reasons people hate entire groups of people are based on actual inferiority.

[Klaralven]

5. Africans carry surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA

For 10 years, geneticists have told the story of how Neanderthals—or at least their DNA sequences—live on in today’s Europeans, Asians, and their descendants. Not so in Africans, the story goes, because modern humans and our extinct cousins interbred only outside of Africa. A new study overturns that notion, revealing an unexpectedly large amount of Neanderthal ancestry in modern populations across Africa. It suggests much of that DNA came from Europeans migrating back into Africa over the past 20,000 years.

“That gene flow with Neanderthals exists in all modern humans, inside and outside of Africa, is a novel and elegant finding,” says anthropologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. The work, reported in this week’s issue of Cell, could also help clear up a mysterious disparity: why East Asians appear to have more Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans.

As members of Homo sapiens spread from Africa into Eurasia some 70,000 years ago, they met and mingled with Neanderthals. Researchers knew that later back-migrations of Europeans had introduced a bit of Neanderthal DNA into African populations, but previous work suggested it was a just a smidgen. In contrast, modern Europeans and East Asians apparently inherited about 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals.

Previous efforts simply assumed that Africans largely lacked Neanderthal DNA. To get more reliable numbers, Princeton University evolutionary biologist Joshua Akey compared the genome of a Neanderthal from Russia’s Altai region in Siberia, sequenced in 2013, to 2504 modern genomes uploaded to the 1000 Genomes Project, a catalog of genomes from around the world that includes five African subpopulations. The researchers then calculated the probability that each stretch of DNA was inherited from a Neanderthal ancestor.

The researchers found that African individuals on average had significantly more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about 17 megabases (Mb) worth, or 0.3% of their genome. They also found signs that a handful of Neanderthal genes may have been selected for after they entered Africans’ genomes, including genes that boost immune function and protect against ultraviolet radiation.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/africans-carry-surprising-amount-neanderthal-dna

[AllaN01Bear]

6. cool. thanks for sharing.

wasnt there also a group called cro magnen? im not shure of the spelling. too early.

[PatrickforO]

16. I always thought cro-magnons were modern humans - sapiens.

I looked it up and apparently they are, or were at least early versions of sapiens.

[wnylib]

20. Cro Magnon is the name given

to the first fully modern human (Homo sapiens) found in Europe. The name is for where he was discovered in modern France. His remains were dated to around 40,000 years ago.

We know that Neanderthals were still in Europe, on the Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) peninsula 30,000 years ago, maybe longer. Plenty of time for interbreeding.

Plus, Homo sapiens encountered Neanderthal in western Asia sooner than that in the Near East. Neanderthal and Homo sapiens met farther east in Asia. Southeastern Asian Homo sapiens intermated with Neanderthal and a close Neanderthal relative, the Denisovans.

No doubt there was back movement from the Near East into Africa, carrying Neanderthal genes back to the Homo sapiens home continent. From then into modern times there have been frequent enough encounters between Europeans and Africans, and Asians and Africans to add Neanderthal genes to people in Africa. And to people of African descent living outside of Africa.

[OriginalGeek]

36. Yeah, the Cro-Mags were a pretty good group

[FailureToCommunicate]

39. And so were the troglodytes...

[OriginalGeek]

40. Yes, they do

make my heart sing...

[Iliyah]

8. Regarding Josh Gates who took a DNA test . . ..

that specifies if in fact the individual carries some DNA from Neanderthals and at the end of the show it did verify that he had a hint of the DNA.

I would assume that at least 50% of the modern population may have the Neanderthal DNA. I would say that at least 96% of the modern population have a mixture of others. Therefore, as human beings, we are one.

The suppose extinction of the Neanderthals is a extremely interesting concept as well.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

9. I don't think we have to theorize

One of Trump's rallies would serve as a live case study. (No insult to Neanderthal's intended)

[tavernier]

13. Wow, that's a fact.

(I would probably add crowds in stadiums at football games, but since I’d get booed, I won’t...)

[bucolic_frolic]

17. That cave is a narrow slice of the world at that time

The idea scientists have found the exact place of mingling and lifestyle does not seem plausible to me. They may have lived in warmer climates, may have migrated, even to other continents or continents then connected, or had some crude rafts. I just don't see this line of scientific inquiry as deterministic. I think it may be more of one thread among many undiscovered threads.

Caves protected the evidence from the elements. Other lifestyle or migration evidence outside caves may well have been destroyed by tens of thousands of years of weather.

[Iliyah]

25. True . ..

Although anthropologists did find that the co-magnons were survivalist and ventured out to different areas of their surroundings and therefore were able to build, cloth and hunt regarding the climate at that time.

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

23. Fun article, thanks. I have about 2% Neanderthal DNA. nt

[Tommy_Carcetti]

24. I'm thinking maybe like this?

[FailureToCommunicate]

38. Yup. Gas guzzling gasbag knuckle draggers (with flags, in case there was any doubt what tribe)

[SheltieLover]

26. Ty for sharing

[CaptainTruth]

28. They were nomadic, wandering from MAGA rally to MAGA rally.

[bluevoter4life]

31. Neanderthals never went extinct

They just bought more powerful weapons and called themselves Trump supporters.

[nolabear]

32. Proud 3.7% Neanderthal.

That’s more than 90-something percent of the population. I attribute my stamina and lack of physical quickness to it. 😄

[machoneman]

33. They all lived at Mara-Lago until driven into extinction by the homeowner's association..people say.

[BobTheSubgenius]

35. I'd say they live a life of extraordinary creature comfort.

Given what we've seen inside the gilded tower, and the rococo grandiosity in the South, at least.