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I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breed

I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breeding.

mirimir 9y ago
Yes, inter-breeding. But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No?
- pegasus 9y ago
  No. You're being overly literal, an occupational hazard for us hackers. Human language works differently from computer languages. I suggest working out your right hemisphere - read some poetry, sing some songs etc. Good luck!
  - mirimir 9y ago
    This is an article in Science. Science is literal. I'm as much a scientist as a hacker. And my right hemisphere is just fine :)
- itsameta4 9y ago
  No, both Neanderthals and humans are generally believed to have each evolved from Homo habilis separately, and then later interbred to varying degrees in various locales.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Yes. And while "ancestors" is technically correct, I'm honoring my Neanderthal ancestors by calling them great^N grandparents. In other places, they had different names, but they were closely related.
      - toasterlovin 9y ago
        Exactly. Though it's more complicated because if you go back even more generations, they're extremely distant cousins as well. The thing we're discovering about human ancestry is that it's not really a tree. Instead, it's more of a directed acyclic graph, where things branch off only to re-merge downstream. For instance, the Denisovans are another archaic human population who split off from a common ancestor and then interbred with humans later on. And there was a recent paper which detected archaic DNA from an unknown source in West Africans. Given that species can typically interbreed for at least a million years after splitting from a common ancestor, combined with the fact that Africa had tons of hominids who coexisted with anatomically modern humans, we're probably going to discover that the story of human ancestry is highly convoluted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...
        mirimir 9y ago
        Yes, it was highly convoluted. I mean, in some unregulated bordellos, non-human primates (and other species) are available. Some of which are also food animals. Off topic, I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes?
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        > I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes? No, just kind of a silly joke between me and my wife. Sorry to disappoint!
        mirimir 9y ago
  - mirimir 9y ago
    When people breed, any children call them their parents.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. What? Cousins are descendants of a recent common ancestor (grandparent for the colloquial first/full cousin), you can breed with them but not doing so doesn't make them non-cousins. > There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No? Yes? But that didn't spawn a new species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis were already separate and well-defined things when that happened.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens (~50 kiloyears ago) were cousins, both descended from Homo habilis. But modern European Homo sapiens sapiens are descendents of both. So Neanderthals are not their cousins, but rather grand^N parents. That is, it all turns on who "our" refers to. In the article, "our" clearly refers to you and me and other humans who lived during the past few thousand years. So the article should say that Neanderthals were "their" cousins, referring to Homo sapiens sapiens living ~50 kiloyears ago. There really should be new species names. I mean, if you're going to distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, shouldn't you also distinguish hybrids? As we do for mules, "E. asinus × E. caballus". But damn, that would distinguish those modern humans without Neanderthal ancestry, which probably wouldn't be a good thing.

I believe us and them were parallel branches, rather than Homo Sapiens descending from Neanderthals. The Neanderthal genes that people have are from inter-breeding.

mirimir 9y ago

Yes, inter-breeding. But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No?

pegasus 9y ago
No. You're being overly literal, an occupational hazard for us hackers. Human language works differently from computer languages. I suggest working out your right hemisphere - read some poetry, sing some songs etc. Good luck!
- mirimir 9y ago
  This is an article in Science. Science is literal. I'm as much a scientist as a hacker. And my right hemisphere is just fine :)
itsameta4 9y ago
No, both Neanderthals and humans are generally believed to have each evolved from Homo habilis separately, and then later interbred to varying degrees in various locales.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Yes. And while "ancestors" is technically correct, I'm honoring my Neanderthal ancestors by calling them great^N grandparents. In other places, they had different names, but they were closely related.
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      Exactly. Though it's more complicated because if you go back even more generations, they're extremely distant cousins as well. The thing we're discovering about human ancestry is that it's not really a tree. Instead, it's more of a directed acyclic graph, where things branch off only to re-merge downstream. For instance, the Denisovans are another archaic human population who split off from a common ancestor and then interbred with humans later on. And there was a recent paper which detected archaic DNA from an unknown source in West Africans. Given that species can typically interbreed for at least a million years after splitting from a common ancestor, combined with the fact that Africa had tons of hominids who coexisted with anatomically modern humans, we're probably going to discover that the story of human ancestry is highly convoluted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_modern_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_human_admixture_with_m...
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Yes, it was highly convoluted. I mean, in some unregulated bordellos, non-human primates (and other species) are available. Some of which are also food animals. Off topic, I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes?
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        > I'm guessing that your username is a reference to Battlestar Galactica. Yes? No, just kind of a silly joke between me and my wife. Sorry to disappoint!
        mirimir 9y ago
- mirimir 9y ago
  When people breed, any children call them their parents.
masklinn 9y ago
> But that's not "cousins", unless you breed with them. What? Cousins are descendants of a recent common ancestor (grandparent for the colloquial first/full cousin), you can breed with them but not doing so doesn't make them non-cousins. > There's no good word for it. But in the sense that an individual has parents, grandparents and so on, the great^N parents of modern Europeans include Neanderthals. No? Yes? But that didn't spawn a new species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis were already separate and well-defined things when that happened.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens (~50 kiloyears ago) were cousins, both descended from Homo habilis. But modern European Homo sapiens sapiens are descendents of both. So Neanderthals are not their cousins, but rather grand^N parents. That is, it all turns on who "our" refers to. In the article, "our" clearly refers to you and me and other humans who lived during the past few thousand years. So the article should say that Neanderthals were "their" cousins, referring to Homo sapiens sapiens living ~50 kiloyears ago. There really should be new species names. I mean, if you're going to distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, shouldn't you also distinguish hybrids? As we do for mules, "E. asinus × E. caballus". But damn, that would distinguish those modern humans without Neanderthal ancestry, which probably wouldn't be a good thing.