I wonder if the Neanderthal were systematically liquidated by Homo sapiens.

[Demonaut]

it seems we repeat ourselves

[customerserviceguy]

1. They actually co-existed at one time

at least enough for interbreeding. Of course, there's no clue as to whether this was in any way consensual or not, although I'd bet on the latter course. Modern humans have anywhere from 1 to about 5 percent of Neanderthal DNA today, especially descendants from European heritage. Some of those genes got "pumped" into sub-Saharan Africa by the Ice Ages.

Me, I've got 2.8%, at least according to 23andMe.

[ProudLib72]

4. I just looked up 23 and Me

I did this type of test with one of our dogs. While it was interesting (and settled a dispute), the results were not substantial. So I am curious what you thought of your results. Was it worth the $100?

[nolabear]

6. I did it and really loved it, though I wasn't happy with all I learned.

Like many people I found out my legendary Choctaw great great grandmother apparently wasn't, though her own father is untraceable in ancestry rolls and lived in Cherokee land. But I found out my ancestral DNA and a whole lot of trait likelihood and medical information. It led us to do some ancestry research and darned if we can't account for much of what it found.

I'm 3.1% Neanderthal, considerably above average. Their speculation about how my ancestors migrated out of Sub Saharan Africa, through what is now Iran, into Southern Europe (where the Neanderthals were) and on into Northern Europe and the British Isles was spot on from what we found. It was really cool. Plus, I found I have no markers for some nasty inheritable diseases and raised ones for some others so I know what to avoid exacerbating.

WELL worth it.

[ProudLib72]

8. There are some native American genes supposedly in my ancestry

So it might be interesting to find out about that, too. Ok, now I'm convinced it's a good idea.

[nolabear]

9. Let me know what you find out!

[customerserviceguy]

11. I've come across people

who have been told about Native American ancestry in their families, or as they would call it in Canada, First Nations heritage. I have a smidgen of it, some 0.3%, and it is probably from the intermixing between the Acadians and the Mi'kmaq people right after colonization of the Canadian maritime region by the French. The chief of the tribe was baptized by the French priest, and his people did not want to leave him in the afterlife, so they obeyed his wishes to have tribal women take French husbands.

The Acadian population was a small founding group, that saw a lot of endogamy for the next hundred years or so, until the British evicted the Acadians just prior to the US Revolutionary War. Some groups stayed within themselves in exile, like the Cajuns in Louisiana. I'm definitely related to some folks in the Louisiana area that have primarily Acadian heritage, so there's a strong possibility that I'm partly Acadian, too.

However, each great-great-great grandparent only has a 50-50 chance of showing up in our genomes, so you could indeed have Choctaw heritage without it being detectable by a DNA test. You have 32 such g-g-g grandparents, and if you rounded up all of your fourth cousins and tested them, only about half of them would show up as related to you, unless there was some intermarriage that duplicated a set of those g-g-g grandparents, giving them a bigger chance of showing up in your results. If you have other people in your family who are her descendants, perhaps they could test, and one of them may have had enough DNA get passed down to detect. See if you can find second cousins among her descendants, and ask if they will test.

[grantcart]

14. I would be curious what the results would be if you submitted it again as a blind test

http://www.insideedition.com/investigative/21784-how-reliable-are-home-dna-ancestry-tests-investigation-uses-triplets-to-find-out


A spokesperson for 23andMe says their results are based on a sliding confidence scale, ranging from 50-90 percent. The higher the confidence level chosen, the less specific the result can be as to the region or country of the person’s ancestry.

Scientific American is worried about its business model

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/23andme-is-terrifying-but-not-for-the-reasons-the-fda-thinks/

Without the testing I am able to tell you that we share mitochondrial eve as a common ancestor!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

[customerserviceguy]

7. Yes

But the thing I wanted to use it for was finding my family, as I was adopted as an infant.

I've been at this for over two years, and while I have not located the identities of my genetic parents, since it probably would take having a really close relative (like a half-sibling or half-first cousin) testing, I still have found a lot of fourth cousins out there who have been quite welcoming to me. I also have a sense of where my bio-parents were from in French Canada.

There's a whole science to this, where you find people who match you and each other on the same significantly long sequences of DNA markers called segments, and then comparing their pedigree trees together. It's likely that a common ancestor gave us those strings, and like any 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, you have to start at the edges and work your way in.

It's pretty much been my main hobby right now, especially since I retired.

[ProudLib72]

10. Well, I have to thank you for turning me on to this

I find this sort of thing fascinating. Like I said above in response to nolabear, I supposedly have Native American ancestors, but no one has been able to prove this. That is one thing I would like to settle once and for all.

[customerserviceguy]

12. You're welcome!

I found out about it nearly three years ago, when my hobby was cleaning old 4th Century bronze coins from the Roman Empire. I saw a banner ad for Family Tree DNA, and followed it, then saved the link in my favorites along with some coin identification websites. After my doctor's assistant said, "There should be some way to figure out your biological parentage," I remembered that link, and submitted samples to all three major DNA companies, the other one being AncestryDNA.

One of my closer relatives lives just across the Hudson River in NY from where I was living until this year, when I moved to SC. Imagine that, I spent my life in the Chicago area, and the Portland-Seattle area for years, until about ten years ago when I moved to a place that was a mere 20 minutes away from someone who probably shares a set of great-great grandparents with me!

[Calculating]

2. I heard that Neanderthals interbred with homo sapiens

In that sense they aren't gone at all. Most modern humans carry neanderthal DNA within them. It's also uncertain whether we 'killed them all' or whether they simply faded away as the ice age went away. They were adapted for a different climate than we have today, and they may have just failed to thrive when the ice age ended.

[California_Republic]

3. I've thought the same.

Surely racism was just as bad back then. Some intermarriage and but extermination

[customerserviceguy]

13. It was probably a survival mechanism

Two groups competing for the same food sources would favor the group that was more xenophobic, and liable to kill off the other side. I do believe racism is learned, but it would not surprise me that it would be easy to lay upon a biologically-inherited predisposition.

[nolabear]

5. Not entirely. I'm proud 3.1% Neanderthal acc to my DNA.

Who knows what happened. We're a violent, inconsistent species that does a whole lot that makes no real sense.

Now I'm having Clan of the Cave Bear flashbacks. Wasn't that what it was about?