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If 1-4% of the Eurasian genome comes from Neanderthals, but sub-Saharan Africans have no Neanderthal genes, does that mean that the EA genome differs from the S
by Camillo 10y ago
If 1-4% of the Eurasian genome comes from Neanderthals, but sub-Saharan Africans have no Neanderthal genes, does that mean that the EA genome differs from the SSA one by 1-4%? And even more so the Melanesian genome, which has 4-6% Denisovan DNA. But at the same time, chimpanzees and humans supposedly share over 99% of their genome. How is that possible? Are these all percentages of the same whole, or is there something else going on?
- adrianN 10y agoIt's important which bits are different too. The absolute percentage doesn't tell you the whole story.
- scatters 10y agoThat's measuring different things. We can tell whether a particular copy of a gene came from the Neanderthal gene pool or the main SSA gene pool by looking at its sequence (esp. at SNPs), but the overall base pair sequence of that gene will still be 99.9% the same. When we say that chimpanzees and humans share 99% of their genome, we're looking at base pairs, but when we say that modern Eurasians have 1-4% of their genome from Neanderthals we're looking at genes.
- Camillo 10y agoThanks, that makes sense.
- snovv_crash 10y agoBecause we were already 99.x percent the same as Neanderthal, so if you take 4% of a Neanderthal genome and replace those sections in a human genome, not very much actually changes.
- hwillis 10y agoOf normal human genetic variation, 1-4% is sourced from Neanderthal DNA, which sub-Saharan African peoples do not share. They still may share up to 96-99% DNA variations. In absolute terms they share in excess of 99.9%[1]. The variations inside ethnic groups are almost 16 times larger than the variations between ethnic groups. [1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1416706/DNA-survey-finds-all-humans-are-99.9pc-the-same.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...