3 ms·
It is a conjecture, the difference just isn't big enough: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2181
by Anotheroneagain 3y ago
It is a conjecture, the difference just isn't big enough:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC21819/
The most striking example is from the Taï forest, where the 19 haplotypes show greater diversity than the entire human clade, even though they occur in a single breeding group.
- Tor3 3y agoI don't see any support in that paper for the idea that Neanderthal DNA doesn't show that it's a different species. On the contrary. What the paper describes is the very well known theory that (modern) humans went through a near-fatal population bottleneck in the not too distant past, which means that the human genetic diversity is so low that two people from different sides of the earth have less genetic variation between them than two chimpanzees from different sides of the river in a single forest have between them.
- Anotheroneagain 3y agoExactly, and that was what made the "Neanderthal" mtDNA seem way too different, but this paper shows that it's well within what would be expected for a single species.