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Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History
- fosco 9y ago>Today, surprisingly, the people carrying the most Neanderthal DNA are not in Europe but in East Asia Interesting, I would love to see more information on this -- I had not heard this previously.
- brudgers 9y agoThe title of the article Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human (and Neanderthal) History directly implies that such people are less human due to carrying more Neanderthal DNA. That the subject of the implication is non-Europeans has a long tradition in the mainstream US magazine business. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the...
- ryandvm 9y agoI have not heard that either. According to 23andMe, I'm in the 99th percentile for Neanderthal DNA variants and my ancestry report claims I'm a disappointingly un-diverse 99.9% European.
- fein 9y ago> disappointingly un-diverse I... What does this even mean? Are you ashamed of your heritage?
- jbeales 9y agoIt probably means he was hoping for a fun surprise, (Something like You're 10% Inca!), but didn't get one. I did the same thing - my Ancestry test came back with a whole lot of "Western Europe" - even more than I expected, actually.
- tartuffe78 9y agoIt would be more interesting to find something unexpected I would think.
- kapilkaisare 9y agoI don't think he is. Let me try to explain why. I haven't done a DNA ancestry test yet, but I imagine I would be pretty happy to learn that there were several peoples/races?/cultures behind me, beyond my apparent South Asian heritage. This does not imply that I am ashamed of my origins - quite the contrary, in fact - but that I imagine it would be nice to ... be more, a citizen of the world, in a fashion. I would expect this outlook of anyone with a cosmopolitan upbringing by default, as well as anyone who has exposed himself or herself to other cultures via media (books, movies, etc..).
- fein 9y agoWe've gotten to a point where Europeans seem to be looking for anything to give them some minority culture status. Just take pride in who and what you are and where you came from.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIt's pretty much frowned upon to be in any way proud to be a pale skinned European; mainstream media demands we feel shame for all the oppression we did in the centuries before our birth. That said, I don't understand how I've can be "proud" of which country you were born in, makes no sense to me.
- fein 9y agoYou use 'we' to describe your collective, showing you understand the concept of heritage, and then go on and say you don't understand pride in your people. Only whites seem to have this internal conflict, and that makes far less sense than being proud of the society your people created.
- elboru 9y ago>I don't understand how I've can be "proud" of which country you were born in, makes no sense to me. I guess it all depends where you draw the line, do you feel proud of your parents? Some people will say "No, I only feel proud about what I accomplished myself." And that's ok, that's his point of view, we could say this is a subjective matter, from my point of view, I feel proud of who I'm, I'm proud of my parents, and then I can extend that line and say I'm proud of my community, my city, my country, my civilization, I'm proud of being part of humanity, obviously that "proudness" will increase when that line is nearer to me, in other words the more relatable to myself the prouder I can be.
- emddudley 9y agoIMO you should never be disappointed with your genetic makeup. It's part of what makes you you, and I can't think of any meaningful difference between people with ancestors from many regions and those with ancestors from one region.
- mc32 9y agoI don't think I'd ever hear a non white say they are disappointed with being 100% what they are, be they Asian, Black, etc. Maybe there are, I've never home across them, but a few whites have this tendency to wish for having "interesting" ancestry like sen. Warren. It's something odd. As if they are somewhat uncomfortable on their own skin. Shame is the wrong word, but i can't find the right descriptor. On the other hand, i think this points to social pressures that make people feel that way about themselves.
- allthenews 9y agoWhat you are seeing is simply a reflection of what is socially acceptable.
- mc32 9y agoSo you're saying whites have the privilege of wishing they had "interesting" DNA history, but others don't have that privilege, even with all they have in say East Asia. I think it's more with social cues and pressures.
- allthenews 9y agoWhat? This isn't about privilege, this is about fashion, and white guilt is increasingly in.
- smhost 9y agoAnd of course, it's not the white guilt that's in fashion. It's the black pride that's in fashion, as it always has been.
- mc32 9y agoWhat? I don't get any of either those assertions. People should be comfortable with who they are. I don't think pride is necessary, but also unnecessary and probably detrimental is to feel uncomfortable with yourself, be that anything, in this case ancestry.
- sct202 9y ago23andme results are subject to change. A few years ago when they first released their Neanderthal estimates, I was at the top of my contact list, but recently I'm like second to last.
- KittiHawk 9y agoMy parents had always told me their grandparents were part Seminole. I liked that because it made me feel more connected to my home. To find out (through a 23andMe report showing 99.9% Euro genes) it wasn't true was unsettling, like I'm not really who I thought I was and also have much less of a connection to the area. Also disappointed because it means someone in my family lied to all of us about where they came from.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoI'm not sure of the exact math but it seems like both things could still be true. We don't get equal portions of genes from each ancestor.
- jbeales 9y agoIt makes fairly logical sense. Neanderthals were fairly well-installed in Europe when modern humans appeared in Africa. As modern humans would have expanded northward into Europe, done their thing with the Neanderthals, (some breeding, lots of killing), and continued eastward, so the human population still in Africa would probably have no Neanderthal DNA, but the population in Asia would carry the results of some interbreeding with Neanderthals. The question this brings up is how different are Neanderthals from Homo sapiens? I was taught that the definition of a species is that two individuals could reproduce and have fertile offspring. It seems there are exceptions to this rule, (as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are different species).
- noelwelsh 9y agoI don't think the concept of a species is well defined. Tiger and lions can interbreed, as can donkeys and horses. And then there are ring species. Biology does whatever it does and then humans try to fit words around it. Edit: correct mules to horses
- mhluongo 9y agoYou're thinking donkeys and horses. I believe a mule is the sterile result of that interbreeding.
- sampo 9y agoMules are mostly sterile, but not 100%. Wikipedia reports some cases where female mules have produced offspring.
- tabtab 9y agoInterbreeding can be ranked on a scale. The less related the groups are, the more problems there are with reproducing. Perhaps a hard boundary of "species" can be drawn where the probability of successful offspring approaches zero. However, that's difficult to measure in practice.
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- Real_S 9y agoThe intermixing was complex. Many groups migrating and interbreeding at various times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/science/a-new-theory-on-how-neanderthal-dna-spread-in-asia.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/science/a-new-theory-on-h...
- tabtab 9y agoPerhaps we really should be called Homohumpian or Homomuttus.
- evrydayhustling 9y agoWhat an awesome antidote to today's depressing story about white nationalists coopting Black Panther as an affirmation of ethnicity-based political states. If science can keep reminding people how random and fragile current ethnic or national divisions are in the face of time, maybe more people will focus on building knowledge that lasts longer.
- haihaibye 9y agoI'm interested in comparing your perspective with the people in favor of ethnicity-based political states. I imagine they want a future where their genes carry on while you are interested in "knowledge that lasts" You could say they are gene-centric and you are meme-centric? Of two futures, which would you prefer? 1. Where your descendants/relatives are alive but have little in common with your values (eg compare bronze age to now) 2. You have no genetic descendants/relatives but whatever exists (robots, aliens, planet of the apes) shares your value system.
- staplers 9y agoAre you suggesting that by mating with similar 'ethnicity' that someones genes are more likely to carry on? I thought it was common knowledge that more diverse DNA has a better chance at survival. Seems like you're suggesting inbreeding is favorable for procreation.
- ardfie 9y agoAccording to this source, third-cousin pairings are the sweet spot https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-incest-is-best-kissi/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-incest-is-be...
- kypro 9y agoThanks for sharing. That's fascinating, I would have never expected that.
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- jack6e 9y agoIn another story popular on HN yesterday/today about DNA [0], some of the commenters discussed epigenetics, and the fact that the DNA sequence is simply the "hardware" that encodes what is possible for cells to produce, but there is "software", if you will, above that which determines how sequences of DNA are actually expressed. In these cases of analyzing really old DNA where only the DNA remains, I wonder how researchers make decisions about selecting what they want to express between varying attributes? I.e., the example used in the article about representing "Cheddar Man" - did they have some basis for selecting the traits to visualize or was it arbitrary? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589412
- laretluval 9y agoI'm not sure the hardware/software analogy is useful. It's more like DNA is source code with a bunch of if statements that depend on the chemical environment the cell is in.
- jack6e 9y agoSorry if that is wrong, I'm just repeating the metaphor used by the more educated people in that other thread to the best of my understanding.
- jccooper 9y agoEpigenetics can sometimes influence pigmentation, but expression of human skin and hair colors is pretty explicitly genetic, so you can expect the same results from the same genes a mere several thousand years apart.
- vinc 9y agoI'd suggest watching some of the recent lectures of Svante Pääbo on YouTube (and his papers on Google Scholar), he's very good at explaining the latest findings. This one for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4TLaRSJN2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4TLaRSJN2k
- bjornsing 9y agoIt's amazing to me how recent these developments are, e.g. that people in Europe looked completely different just 10000 years ago, or that just 40000 years ago a different humanoid species (Neanderthals) existed...
- vivekd 9y agoOkay someone explain this to me because I don't get it - how can we get the sample of a 40 000 year old specimen and tell that it's species had interbred with humans. I mean - Neanderthals are pretty closely related to us us, couldn't genetic similarities be a result of that common origin rather than interbreeding. How can DNA tell that apart?
- evrydayhustling 9y agoGenes are never perfectly conserved; they accumulate mutations through generations. The rate of mutations can act as a clock, telling us how far back was the common origin of two genes that are similar today. When we see modern populations that carry neanderthal genes that are better conserved within the population than some human-specific genes are with other human populations, we can infer that the neanderthal intermixing happened after humans became... human. At large scale, many such inferences can be combined to form a historical map of population mixing and the migrations implied... That's what the research in the article is about.