posted December 19, 2010 03:17 PM            

The discovery emerged from the first attempt to map the complete genetic code, or genome, of Neanderthals - an offshoot of the human family tree that died out 30,000 years ago.

It found that we have much more in common than previously thought.

It also raises questions about what it means to be a human being.

'It's so exciting because the Neanderthals are our closest evolutionary relatives,' said Dr Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who led the international project.

'If we want to define genetically what makes all human beings that live today unique - not only relative to our closest living relatives the chimpanzees but to our closest extinct relatives the Neanderthals - we can now begin to do so.'

The findings are the result of a four-year study in which researchers analysed 1.1 billion fragments of DNA taken from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones discovered in Russia, Spain, Germany and Croatia.

The team - who publish their findings in the journal Science - were able to decode around 60 per cent of the entire genome of the extinct species.

They compared the results with the complete set of DNA from five people in southern and west Africa, China, Papua New Guinea and France.

The results showed that up to 4 per cent of the DNA of non-African people alive today is Neanderthal.

Experts believe that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common ancestor in Africa. Around 400,000 years ago early Neanderthals left Africa and headed for Europe and Asia. However, our ancestors stayed behind, and evolved into modern humans.

Then, 100,000 years ago, they too left Africa in a wave of migrations.

The two species lived alongside each other in Europe and Asia until the Neanderthals vanished around 30,000 years ago, possibly driven to extinction by the smarter and more competitive modern humans. Past studies have cast doubt on the chances of interbreeding between the two groups.

But the new research shows modern Asians and Europeans have between one and four per cent of Neanderthal DNA.

Professor Paabo said: 'Since we see this pattern in all people outside Africa, not just the region where Neanderthals existed, we speculate that this happened in some population of modern humans that then became the ancestors of all present-day non-Africans.

'The most plausible region is in the Middle East, where the first modern humans appeared before 100,000 years ago and where there were Neanderthals until at least 60,000 years ago.

'Modern humans that came out of Africa to colonise the rest of the world had to pass through that region.'

No one knows how common interbreeding was. Neanderthal genes could have been passed on to our ancestors if a group of 1,000 modern people bred with just 20 to 40 Neanderthal women.

Researchers are unsure whether the Neanderthal genes are important or what role they perform.

British Neanderthal expert Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum hailed the research as a 'phenomenal technical achievement'.

He said: 'It means I have to accept that I have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in me.'

posted December 19, 2010 05:28 PM            

Breeding with Neanderthals may have improved the human brain.

New research reveals that Neanderthals, who first appeared around 230,000 to 300,000 years ago, were not dumb, but had the technical and intellectual skills to put them on an equal basis with modern humans. They were capable of making sophisticated tools using a kind of prehistoric superglue that had to be made at a precise temperature.

“This finding demonstrates that the Neanderthals must have possessed a high degree of technical and manual abilities, comparable to those of modern Homo sapiens,” says Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. “It would further show that the behavior gap between us and Neanderthals is narrower than we thought. Some may say there isn’t a gap.” The new finding means that Neanderthals did not disappear because they were inferior. Modern man is more likely a composition of various hominid species that interbred with each other and exchanged genes into the population.

The research centers on a new analysis of two samples of blackish-brown pitch discovered in a lignite open-mining pit in the foothills of the Harz mountains in Germany. Their geological location suggests they are more than 80,000 years old. One of the pitch pieces bears the print of a finger and there are also imprints of a flint stone tool and wood, suggesting that the pitch acted as glue, to attach a wooden shaft to a flint stone blade.

A team of scientists, led by Professor Dietrich Mania of Freidrich-Schiller University in Jena, wanted to find out the chemical composition of the pitch, its biological origins, and the amount of skill and ability needed to make it. It was originally thought that the pitch was made from melted pine resin. But although such resins can work as putty, they are not strong enough to work as glue.

When the researchers broke down the samples, they found that they consisted of birch pitch, which is far more difficult to make. Birch pitches can be produced only at temperatures of 570-750 degrees F. At lower temperatures, no tar is produced, while higher temperatures destroy any tar that has formed.

“Today, comparable pitches can easily be produced with modern technical methods, like airtight laboratory flasks and temperature control facilities,” say the researchers. “However, any attempt at simulating the conditions of the Neanderthal period and at producing these birch pitches without any of these modern facilities will soon be met with many difficulties. This implies that the Neanderthals did not come across these pitches by accident but must have produced them with intent. Conscious action is, however, always a clear sign of considerable technical capabilities. The pitch finds demonstrate that the Neanderthals must have possessed a high degree of technical and manual abilities, comparable to those of modern Homo sapiens.”

posted December 19, 2010 11:50 PM            

I am well aware of this information,and there are white supremacists are using this as a case that people of black African descent are inferior.

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No..I am not a Virgo.

posted December 20, 2010 11:08 AM            

quote:

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September 17, 2008—Meet Wilma—named for the redheaded Flintstones character—the first model of a Neanderthal based in part on ancient DNA evidence.

Artists and scientists created Wilma (shown in a photo released yesterday) using analysis of DNA from 43,000-year-old bones that had been cannibalized. Announced in October 2007, the findings had suggested that at least some Neanderthals would have had red hair, pale skin, and possibly freckles.

Created for an October 2008 National Geographic magazine article, Wilma has a skeleton made from replicas of pelvis and skull bones from Neanderthal females. Copies of male Neanderthal bones—resized to female dimensions—filled in the gaps.

(The National Geographic Society owns both National Geographic News and National Geographic magazine.)

"For the first time, anthropologists can go beyond fossils and peer into the actual genes of an extinct species of human," said National Geographic's senior science editor, Jamie Shreeve, who oversaw the project.

"We saw an opportunity to literally embody this new science in a full-size Neanderthal female, reconstructed using the latest information from genetics, fossil evidence, and archaeology."

For more on Neanderthals, watch Neanderthal Code, airing Sunday, September 21, on the National Geographic Channel.

—David Braun

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quote:

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Some Neandertals Were Pale Redheads, DNA Suggests
Brian Handywerk
for National Geographic News
October 25, 2007

Some Neandertals may have had red hair and pale skin, just as some modern humans do, according to a new genetic study.

The traits were likely more common in European Neandertals (often spelled Neanderthals), just as they are often seen in modern humans of European descent.
"I am quite sure this variant arose like the red hair variants in modern Europeans," said the study's lead author Carles Lalueza-Fox, of the University of Barcelona.

In the cases of both Neandertals and modern Europeans, he said, the gene mutation that caused fairer complexions spread only after the respective populations migrated from Africa.

Gene Keys Complexion Change

While studying Neandertal DNA samples, Lalueza-Fox's team found an unknown mutation in a key gene called MC1R.

Also present in modern humans, the gene regulates a protein that guides the production of melanin, which pigments hair and skin and protects from UV rays.

Variations in this gene's sequence limit melanin production in people with pale skin and red hair, although the particular mutation found by the researchers is not known to occur in modern humans.

The team tested the gene in living cells to see what effect the previously unknown variant would have had on the Neandertals who carried it. The test tube experiment showed that the variant suppressed the production of melanin, and thus likely gave the Neandertals who carried it red hair and pale skin.

Although it is not easy to find intact DNA from 230,000 to 30,000 years ago, Lalueza-Fox and his colleagues were able to study two separate samples unearthed in Italy and Spain.

The study was published today by the journal Science.

Skin Changes Similar in Humans, Neandertals
Lalueza-Fox believes the variant his team discovered was likely one of many that spread through ancient Neandertal populations by processes of natural selection.

"European [humans] have quite a lot of variation in this gene—not only red hair variants but also others," he explained, adding that humans have been in Europe for only about 40,000 years.
"The Neandertals, being there at least 400,000 [years], likely accumulated ten times more variation."

Neandertals are believed to have roamed Europe between 28,000 and 400,000 years ago.

James Noonan, a geneticist at the Yale University School of Medicine who was unaffiliated with the research, said Lalueza-Fox's conclusions were convincing.

"It's not surprising that there would be a Neandertal-specific MC1R variant that results in a partial loss of function (and thus lighter skin and hair)," he said. "Similar mutations have arisen independently in different modern human populations."

Another scientist who was not involved with the research, Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, added that a number of genes that affect human skin color are still changing and spreading through Europe and Asia.

The particular genes that affects skin color are different in Europe and Asia, he said, but in both places, fairer complexions appear to be the result of broken versions of these genes.

"This paper suggests that Neandertals were light, or were getting light, in the same way, i.e., by selection for slightly broken genes," he said.

Scientists are not sure why the broken gene—and fairer complexions—would be spread by natural selection.

Yale's Noonan said geography was the likeliest explanation for the endurance of this trait in both modern humans and Neandertals—pigment advantage was likely less relevant in darker places.

Northern latitudes have "less sunlight and so less need for darker skin pigmentation to protect against UV-induced damage," Noonan said.

Though the genetic processes that helped to lighten their complexions may have worked similarly, humans have never displayed the same sequence seen in the ancient Neandertal gene samples.

"Both processes took place independently—that's the reason the Neandertal variant is not present in modern humans," Lalueza-Fox said.

The new find offers no evidence of interbreeding between humans and Neandertals, he added.

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posted December 20, 2010 12:27 PM            

The DRD4 7R gene is said to come into existence between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago.

J haplogroup was said to start around 45,000 years ago. It started in the Near East/Western Asia.
J1 subclade was said to start around 27,000 years ago
J2 subclade was said to start around 19,000 years ago

The "back-to-Africa" haplogroups including U6, X1 and possibly M1 have returned to Africa possibly as far back as 45,000 years ago

I wonder if mixing with Neanderthals correlated with new Haplogroups that stemmed from THE original haplogroup which is L which is predominant in Subsaharan Africa.

The Neanderthals could have mated with the L haplogroup people that came from Africa, and that could have resulted in other haplogroups.

The haplogroups that branch off into other haplogroups and subclades are based on genetic mutations.

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No..I am not a Virgo.

posted December 20, 2010 12:57 PM            

Bryan Sykes had claimed there were seven major mitochondrial lineages for modern Europeans but others now put the number at 10-12. These additional "daughters" generally include haplogroups I, M and W. A recent paper re-mapped European haplogroups as H, J, K, N1, T, U4, U5, V, X and W.[4]

* N : 75,000 years ago (in North-East Africa)
* R : 70,000 years ago (in South-West Asia)
* U : 60,000 years ago (in North-East Africa or South-West Asia)
* pre-JT : 55,000 years ago (in the Middle East)
* JT : 50,000 years ago (in the Middle East)
* U5 : 50,000 years ago (in Western Asia)
* U6 : 50,000 years ago (in North Africa)
* U8 : 50,000 years ago (in Western Asia)
* pre-HV : 50,000 years ago (in the Near East)
* J : 45,000 years ago (in the Near East or Caucasus)
* HV : 40,000 years ago (in the Near East)
* H : over 35,000 years ago (in the Near East or Southern Europe)
* X : over 30,000 years ago (in north-east Europe)
* U5a1 : 30,000 years ago (in Europe)
* I : 30,000 years ago (Caucasus or north-east Europe)
* J1a : 27,000 years ago (in the Near East)
* W : 25,000 years ago (in north-east Europe or north-west Asia)
* U4 : 25,000 years ago (in Central Asia)
* J1b : 23,000 years ago (in the Near East)
* T : 17,000 years ago (in Mesopotamia)
* K : 16,000 years ago (in the Near East)
* V : 15,000 years ago (arose in Iberia and moved to Scandinavia)
* H1b : 13,000 years ago (in Europe)
* K1 : 12,000 years ago (in the Near East)
* H3 : 10,000 years ago (in Western Europe) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup

The Haplogroups around 40,000 years ago when humans came to Europe:

# J : 45,000 years ago (in the Near East or Caucasus)
# HV : 40,000 years ago (in the Near East)
# H : over 35,000 years ago (in the Near East or Southern Europe)
# X : over 30,000 years ago (in north-east
Europe)

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No..I am not a Virgo.