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Who are Neanderthals ?

Neanderthals, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. They probably went extinct due to competition with or extermination by immigrating modern humans or due to great climatic change, disease, or a combination of these factors. Wikipedia

Neanderthal genes found for first time in African populations
Findings suggest human and Neanderthal lineages more closely intertwined that once thought

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
@hannahdev
Thu 30 Jan 2020 11.00 EST , The Guardian


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African populations have been revealed to share Neanderthal ancestry for the first time, in findings that add a new twist to the tale of ancient humans and our closest known relatives.

Previously it was believed that only non-African populations carried Neanderthal genes due to interbreeding that took place after a major human migration out of Africa and across the globe about 60,000 years ago.

The latest findings suggest human and Neanderthal lineages are more closely intertwined than once thought and point to far earlier interbreeding events, about 200,000 years ago.


“Our results show this history was much more interesting and there were many waves of dispersal out of Africa, some of which led to admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals that we see in the genomes of all living individuals today,” said Joshua Akey, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University and senior author of the research.

The study suggests living Europeans and Asians carry about 1% Neanderthal DNA, compared with on average 0.3% for those of African ancestry.

Akey and colleagues believe that this Neanderthal DNA arrived in Africa with ancient Europeans whose ancestors – over many generations – had left Africa, met and mated with Neanderthals and then returned to Africa and mixed with local populations.


“An important aspect of our study is that it highlights humans, and hominins, were moving in and out of Africa for hundreds of thousands of years and occasionally admixing,” said Akey. “These back-to-Africa migrations, largely from ancestors of contemporary Europeans, carried Neanderthal sequences with them, and through admixture, contributed to the Neanderthal ancestry we detect in African individuals today.”

The increasingly fine-grained details of our ancestors’ migration patterns and intimate encounters with other types of human are coming into focus thanks to the advent of sophisticated computational genetics techniques.

These statistical methods allow scientists to line up the Neanderthal genome side by side with that of ancient modern humans and DNA from different living populations and figure out whether the different lineages have been steadily diverging or whether there are blips where large chunks of DNA were exchanged at certain time points.


The latest comparison highlights previously unnoticed ancient human genes in the Neanderthal genome, apparently acquired from interbreeding events dating to about 200,000 years ago. This suggests an early group of humans travelled from Africa to Europe or Asia, where they encountered Neanderthal populations and left a faint imprint on their genome that could still be detected more than 100,000 years later.

The paper also highlights the relative lack of genetics research in African populations, despite modern humans having first emerged on the continent and despite African populations today being more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined.

“To more fully understand human genomic variation and human evolutionary history, it is imperative to comprehensively sample individuals from all regions of the world, and Africa remains one of the most understudied regions,” said Akey.


It is not known whether all African populations, some of whose roots stretch into the deep past, share this Neanderthal heritage. KhoeSan (bushmen) and Mbuti (central African pygmy) populations, for instance, appear to have split off from other groups more than 100,000 years ago.

The findings are published in the journal Cell.

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Neanderthals

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/30/neanderthal-genes-found-for-first-time-in-african-populations

But blacks are said to resemble these Neanderthals, so how is this a new finding? The lies of the scientific community are crude.

What? How come? I actually thought this was fake news, but I guess it's like the paper suggests: an early group must have traveled to Europe or Asia or it was picked up by modern humans

fieryy:
What? How come? I actually thought this was fake news, but I guess it's like the paper suggests: an early group must have traveled to Europe or Asia or it was picked up by modern humans

I think it as a result of interbreeding between modern Africans and the Europeans who already carry the gene.

SMBH:
I think it as a result of interbreeding between modern Africans and the Europeans who already carry the gene.

Yeah, I think so too. It's what I actually meant with 'picked it up by modern humans '. To be honest, I was genuinely surprised reading about this

fieryy:
Yeah, I think so too. It's what I actually meant with 'picked it up by modern humans '. To be honest, I was genuinely surprised reading about this

Why are you suprised? Are you just reading stuff like this for the first time?

I have been following the "human interbreeded with Neanderthals theory for quite a while".

BRATISLAVA:
But blacks are said to resemble these Neanderthals, so how is this a new finding? The lies of the scientific community are crude.

how do blacks resemble Neanderthals and who said that? You are incorrect.

This particular finding is not surprising as there are African populations that will carry Neanderthal DNA but at a lower frequency due to back migrations. The deeper you go into Africa the less likely the populations would carry this particular gene.

SMBH:
Why are you suprised? Are you just reading stuff like this for the first time?

I have been following the "human interbreeded with Neanderthals theory for quite a while".

Why are you NOT surprised? The Neanderthals happen to have lived in Eurasia. Interbreeding with the homo sapiens could have only happened there. This itself is a new finding and I bet the scientists must have bern surprised as well

They are liars from the beginning, now and will to the end of their days. Black People don't possess no neanderthal genes. Did We at some point in time degenerate into the so called homo erectus? Yes, for a short time, and it wasn't to that extent that We lost our humanity in the process.

fieryy:
Why are you NOT surprised? The Neanderthals happen to have lived in Eurasia. Interbreeding with the homo sapiens could have only happened there. This itself is a new finding and I bet the scientists must have bern surprised as well

I just think its as a result of migration out of africa and then back to Africa. So, yes ain't surprised at all.

gatiano:
They are liars from the beginning, now and will to the end of their days. Black People don't possess no neanderthal genes. Did We at some point in time degenerate into the so called homo erectus? Yes, for a short time, and it wasn't to that extent that We lost our humanity in the process.

How can a species that is evolving degenerate biologically. Homo Sapien(not black people for your information) that appeared in Africa first may likely have mated with other ancient archaic human population roaming around in Africa but that is not a degeneration but simply an absorbing of additional variant genes into the gene pool of the Homo Sapien as it was with Neanderthal and Denisovan.

Ps. Homoerectus was not this archaic species