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Mum’s a Neanderthal, Dad’s a Denisovan: discovery of an ancient-human hybrid
- rgrieselhuber 8y agoThose beer goggles must have been next level.
- 21 8y agohttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreenSkinnedSpaceBabe https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreenSkinnedSpac...
- gerdesj 8y agoI know that we don't all have the same sense of humour but rgrieselhuber did not deserve to be DVd. I will accept that their comment was not exactly useful but it could be construed as funny. Why, HN, why?
- ilove_banh_mi 8y agoThis happened a mere 5,000 generations ago... (before the separate admixture with European and Melanasian Homo Sapiens). Were the Denisovans as different from Neanderthals as Sapiens were from either branch? † Reading the branch/tree diagram it looks like only Europeans mixed it up with the Neanderthals, after splitting from Asians, and only Asians with the Denisovans, also after the split. Meanwhile Africans never encountered or mixed with either of those ancient hominid branches. Our ancestor branches and genome are so varied and rich! † "Denisovans and Neanderthals split from Homo sapiens around 744,000 years ago and diverged from each other 300 generations after that."
- danieltillett 8y agoThat is not quite right - Asians actually have more Neanderthal genes than Europeans. The current best hypothesis is that there have been multiple Neanderthal/SSA hybridization events and that some occurred post the split between Europeans and East Asians (the first occurred in the near East and later events occurred in East Asia).
- dustfinger 8y agoWonderful, now someone lucky can update the Wikipedia [1] entry for Denisova Hominin :-) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova_hominin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova_hominin
- obelos 8y agoIt's a historical storyboard for a “Quest for Fire 2”, sequel to one of the greatest romance films ever!
- WalterSear 8y agoIt will never work. He's a man of the world, and her family are a bunch of cave dwellers.
- EGreg 8y agoHow would they know they are different species? They don't have their DNA. The Denisovans are just a different form and we don't find them outside one cave. And now they claim that different species can interbreed? Who determines all this?
- Symmetry 8y agoWhether Denisivans and Neanderthals are different species is mostly just a matter of semantics. We have had a pretty good look at the DNA of each and it's clear that the two were evolving in isolation for hundreds of thousands of years resulting in genetically distinct populations. The difference between Denisovans and Neanderthals is about half the difference between humans and either. It's not at all unusual for two different species to be able to interbreed. Lions and tigers for instance or horses and donkeys. Mules, the offspring of horses and donkeys are sterile, though, so the two populations can't mix. Ligoers, the offspring of a male lion and female tigers, aren't entirely sterile but have very low fertility. With humans and neanderthals there are portions of the Neanderthal genome related to reproduction that were very heavily selected against in a way which seems to indicate that male hybrids at least had moderate fertility problems until those genes were removed. So it's not black and white at all. We have zero evidence for any reduction in fertility between Neanderthals and Denisovans since we have very few examples of hybrid offspring and this sort of analysis needs lots of data - so who knows.
- danieltillett 8y agoWe wrote almost exactly the same thing :) One nitpick it is not male hybrids that had reduced fertility, but following Haldane’s rule it was the male SSA (sub-saharan african) and Denisovan/Neanderthal female offspring that were infertile - the other way around were fertile or else there would be no descendants of the Denisovans and Neanderthals living today.
- EGreg 8y agoThat’s my point. We don’t know the amount of gene transfer between the two groups at different times. Calling something two different species usually implies some sort of allopatric speciation leading to almost zero gene sharing. Can you name a single proven example of something like this happening in the last few thousand years?
- koosnel 8y agoInteresting how main stream science obsesses over Neanderthals but ignore Boskopoids. I suppose it does not fit in with the narrative being projected on humanity. Also worth mentioning Adam's calendar which was discovered in 2003 in South Africa and predates Stonehenge by 10s of thousands of years.
- goodcanadian 8y agoA quick Google suggests Boskop man was a modern human and Adam's calendar are 16th century livestock enclosures . . . so I'm really not sure what you are trying to say.
- koosnel 8y agoWell I did more than a "quick Google" so I can understand that you are not sure.
- messe 8y agoPlease cite your sources then.
- noselasd 8y agoI hope this means you did not end up on all the crackpot sites that runs counter to any sane scientific approach and runs their arguments based on refuting existing research based on incompleteness and plain disbelief ? Do you have some credible information, or are they secret ?
- saiya-jin 8y ago> Adam's calendar which was discovered in 2003 in South Africa and predates Stonehenge by 10s of thousands of years. Wikipedia wildly disagrees with you [1], it's few hundred years old [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaauboschkraal_stone_ruins
- koosnel 8y ago
- nosjwshere 8y agoah, the sovian family.