Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Humans and Neanderthals: Where are the Connections?



From a Jared Diamond review of David Reich's new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past:
All modern humans outside Africa, but no modern Africans, carry about 2 percent of Neanderthal genes. That means that, as modern humans expanded from their African origins into the Near East between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, they met and occasionally had sex with Neanderthals: perhaps mainly when a lonely modern human found few other moderns with whom to mate. Their hybrid descendants then spread around the world, carrying their 2 percent of Neanderthal genes to everywhere outside Africa.
Also from the review:
 Native Americans may not like hearing that 10,000-year-old Native American skeletons whose repatriation and reburial they seek have no demonstrable connection to tribes living in the same geographic area today. 



  -Robert Wenzel

10 comments:

  1. Neanderthals were simply another group of humans with distinctive features in a particular region; like eskimo's. "Then God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind'; and it was so.
    Evolution is a lie, it is a deception to hide God.

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    1. You're reading the Bible like a Muslim reads the Koran.

      There is no conflict between evolution and Christianity, only Christians who are confused by the Islamifying heresy of Solo Scriptorum get tripped up by evolution.

      I am a chemist, I see God revealed in the miracles of how the universe works. Mere physics running it's course brings forth you and I to talk about God. THAT IS THE MIRACLE.

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    2. God is just a lie to hide the lizard people from outer space who built the pyramids and live among us.

      ..."Then Geognak commanded his minions to command the people of earth to write a scroll claiming a God said a bunch of stuff"
      -Book of who cares 25:100

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    3. Did you always believe that, or has your thinking evolved?

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  2. The introduction is quite revealing. The author praises the founder of his science of genetic studies and then shows how most of the founders theories were proven wrong by the more advanced technologies available in genetic studies. This begs the question: How valid and useful is this current book? The author acknowledges this but has no answer. Then at the end of the intro he relates a story about one of his lectures. A graduste student attending the lecture asks how was he able to fund this type of research? His answer was government/crony finds.

    His acknowledgement of past failures, his heavy use of statistics in his study's methodology, and the funding from non-voluntary sources reminds me of the climate change studies. Heavy on politics lite on science. This book's only value is the inadvertent revelation that human life is too complex for studies of this type.

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  3. The Neanderthal tools came from local quarries, and the modern human tools came from many, many miles away. So the modern humans traded for tools with others, Neanderthals did not. So maybe this 2% of our genes is the part of us that does not like or trust outsiders and would rather have a trade war than open borders and free market exchange.

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  4. I have to say, I am really surprised LabRat doesnt have something racist to say about this one.

    Wait for it..... Wait for it....

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  5. Ancient inequality shows up in our DNA?

    That is what Dr. Reich says in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkrQunufghQ

    Sounds more like PC semantics.

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  6. And I just thought Neanderthal women where hot!

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