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IANAGeneticist but afaik it is known that there was interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals and there are populations in Europe and Middle East wit
by seemslegit 7y ago
IANAGeneticist but afaik it is known that there was interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals and there are populations in Europe and Middle East with genetically discernible neanderthal ancestry, still your observation that they "look like a Neanderthal" is probably affected by confirmation bias.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoActually all that is known is that there is shared genetic sequences that indicate interbreeding as one possible scenario. I've heard others make the claim that the same phenomenon could have been caused by populations of sapiens that had archaic genetic features (that is shared by both sapiens and neanderthal) from much further back. I expect the genetic picture is far more complicated than we thought or think, and "interbreeding" is a simplistic way of talking about populations. Species are, after all, a taxonomical concept we invented, not an actual thing in nature. The lines are far more blurry.
- seemslegit 7y agoNo disagreement there, just pointing that interbreeding is a natural default hypotheses given that we know that at some point their living areas began to overlap and the Neanderthals eventually disappeared as a distinct species by that taxonomy - the debates afaik are about the scale of the phenomena that is whether they were mostly absorbed by modern humans or mostly driven to extinction or even killed by them.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoLots of animals have gone extinct when our range overlapped with theirs :-)
- seemslegit 7y agoYes but ancient modern humans would have recognized Neanderthals as humans rather than animals even if they had knowledge of other hominids.