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No, both Neanderthals and humans are generally believed to have each evolved from Homo habilis separately, and then later interbred to varying degrees in variou

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 8y ago
Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.
- mirimir 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
        Oh. Did get me thinking about Six, though ;)
mirimir 8y ago
When people breed, any children call them their parents.

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 8y ago

Right, the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians include Neanderthals.

mirimir 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y ago
        Oh. Did get me thinking about Six, though ;)

mirimir 8y ago

When people breed, any children call them their parents.