> for example the 2026 discovery that interbreeding was predominantly between Neanderthal males and human females, and not between Neanderthal females and human males.
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
Am I wrong in thinking that these babies are bred as a result of inter-group conflict and r_pe, rather than voluntarily? I never thought of it as likely to be due to "romance" between species.
If that is the case, it may also be that male homo sapiens weren't strong enough to subdue neanderthal females.
I think this is what you want to think, to support a world-view you have had constructed in your head through prior, often unrelated, experiences.
Prejudice is natural, being able to fight the first hunch & against instinct, await & study more information is really hard. At least for me, it requires active effort.
I don't want to think anything in particular at all and this is tied to no specific worldview, just a rudimentary knowledge of history.
It still happens today in armed conflict, so I don't know why you would think it would be less common amongst early humans operating without a moral framework.
All your active effort to study seems to be misleading you. Perhaps you are studying the wrong things?
Isn't it believed to be (at least partially) caused by maternofetal Rh incompatibility that was likely to happen with Neanderthal mother and human father?
There is a paper that was describing, that Neanderthals had their mtdna replaced by something mtdna that was more related to Homo Sapiens starting about 400 000 years ago and fully replaced? 200 000 years ago, so matrilineally Neanderthals were close to Homo Sapiens already. And that question should have not been raised nowadays at all.
Besides we also have already found remains of 50% and 25% hybrids, so doesn't seem to be a problem of interbreeding with other humans - just like our ancestors had not issues interbreed with Denisovans as well, with whom we had slightly larger DNA differences than with Neanderthals.
Bigger issue seems to be that Neanderthal inbreeding between themselves as they were living without access to other pools of dna of humans and that most probably was a cause why they did not bounce back.
Lol. Bride kidnapping is still a thing. In my culture it’s not a thing anymore, but it’s still being acted out as part of wedding customs. There’s also a separate word for “people who go after the people who stole the girl”.
I find it more likely the admixture is from girls our ancestors went to take back who were already pregnant.
The Neanderthal extinction always made me think that erasure of races in our modern times will follow a similar pattern. People think of the Native Americans as getting wiped out by disease/violence over a few years, but their ultimate end (and every other races end) probably will be similar to Neanderthals: slowly getting bred out of existence until finding someone with >2% DNA is a novelty. Same thing will probably happen to any smaller populations as globalization/interbreeding means massive populations like China/India will end up being the majority of the DNA.
Yes but draw an arbitrary line around any group. Call them HNdrathals if you want. Define them at one instaneous snapshot in time as 100% conserved gene corpus. Then watch generation after generation, as some of the HNers (against all odds) interbreed with the surrounding populace. After one hundred generations, should we expect many people to be more than 2% HNdrathal? Yet did the HNdrathals ‘die out’?
Careful, HNers are a population with a history of trauma associated with unclosed parentheses. By raising our cortisol levels you may be lowering our fertility rate by exposing us to them.
I'm always surprised at the opposite. We have such distinct ethnicities. It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
>It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
Here in Belgium my grandma was first to go work 2 municipalities away. Her parents were farmers.
She cried when she came back and swore she would not go back the next day. Such a distant place was traveling to the end of the world to her i guess.
Later they traveled to the south of france by bus and such but they never went beyond a neighbouring country. Still it's a thing her parents could only have dreamed of.
I think people have a bias by which they forget the massive technological advancements of recent years on one hand.
And see the stories of travelers of the distant past on the norm on the other hand rather than things written about because they were so rare and interesting.
Most people stayed put untill you could pinpoint their location based on their genome and it influenced who you can get donor organs from. They repeatedly developed local cultures, languages and dialects in doing so.
>But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Those are not ethnic groups. The Flemish, the Vilamovians, the Germans, the Basques, the irish are examples of ethnic groups.
Idk if it's intentional but there seems to be this progressive shift/push that pushed nation to mean state and now makes it so some start using ethnicity instead of racial categorisation (which is a vague often even more arbitrary thing)
By DNA there is rarely any non-mixed population of ethnic groups. That applies both to maternal(unless interbreeding is a preference) and paternal lineages, as people are quite mixed, but borders of cultures and beliefs(in various myths - including about their ancestry) is what is holding societies together.
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out.
USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
> It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
It feels like it for you because you are used to man-made definitions of "race". US is for some historical reason a very race-aware culture.
Skin color for example is mostly related to exposure to the sun. When you go south in Northern hemisphere people become darker. But you call them "black" or "brown" for some reason. Or Africa is a giant continent. You call all the different people on it "black". They are just darker because they've adapted to the sun through generations.
US historically has people that have migrated from different continents. I live in a country (Turkey) where everyone is historically "mixed". There are blonde people, dark people, people with small eyes and large eyes. But they are all the same group of people. We're practically blind to superficial differences you call "race" or even ethnicity.
Also "mixed" doesn't mean the average color between black and white. They can have a dominant phenotype.
All these are arbitrary. The genetic distance between a European with a high percentage of neanderthal DNA and that of some African populations is probably more comparable than some might expect. And whether we should consider Neanderthals a separate species, is again, probably more debatable than some might expect.
What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.
> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.
> I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
That’s because you’re holding a particular snapshot of a race in your mind. If you really think about it, a lot of people are intensely mixed. Most African-Americans, a significant portion of white annericans, all Hispanics, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and all of South Asia are racially mixed. That’s probably half the world’s population.
We could argue a long time about what counts as "mixed" or as a "race", but there are definitely genetic clusters[0]. I don't think it's that surprising given fast travel is a relatively recent invention. The clusters will probably become less distinct over time.
The point I’m trying to make is these genetic clusters are from a particular snapshot of time when we decided to classify these. Each of those clusters is already a combination of a smaller number of clusters that would have existed in a previous snapshot. And I’m not talking about a snapshot from prehistoric times more along the scale of a few centuries.
With neanderthals it was physical factors. With groups in modern times it’ll probably be cultural factors. Many groups have panda-like reproductive preferences.
The only DNA genes we have are coming from Middle East contact of Neanderthals with Homo Sapiens. There was no bred out of the extinction event, specific to Neanderthals only, as we are missing also majority of DNA of those early Homo Sapiens.
Races has nothing to do with any of that - Neanderthals themselves seems to had different looks, depending on region they were living and had contacts with other humans - and we all were the same species.
Yes, there are no distinct races of modern humans. Whenever people in the US describe ethnic groups as races I cringe and wonder how much damage this misinformation is still causing.
I usually find myself lurking around when Americans discuss this topic. I like to imagine I'm an Anthropologist/Time-traveler that travelled back in time to the witch trials and is trying to blend in not to get caught by the villagers.
Yes, unless some natural or anthropogenic disaster makes it impossible to visit other continents.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
>Same thing will probably happen to any smaller populations as globalization/interbreeding means massive populations like China/India will end up being the majority of the DNA.
China's 1.0ish fertility rate means that they will be gone in 14 generations or so. India's not that far behind them. It's strange hearing people talk about the "erasure of races"... a meme that goes back 70 or more years at this point, when the only race that will be erased is the human race.
When fertility rates are 1.0, every subsequent human generation is half the size of the previous. Rapid population will become impossible to ignore in just a few decades. Human extinction looms.
>I don't see why fertility rates wouldn't change with time.
Of course they'll change with time. They'll go down further. Not what you mean, you somehow believe they'll go back up... but without bothering to come up with an explanation for why they'd do that. Maybe because it's emotionally comfortable to imagine it so, or convenient to your argument.
In reality, low fertility rates cause economic stagnation that most believe to be the cause of even lower fertility rates. It will spiral.
There has to be a living person that is the very most Neanderthal, it would be cool if the consumer DNA companies consensually released that. It would satiate my curiosity and probably lead to lucrative influencer money for the person revealed
"While 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives today, most people only carry about a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA, and most Neanderthal-derived DNA is non-coding. Neanderthals maintained a low genetic diversity and suffered from inbreeding depression; consequently most Neanderthal genes were probably selected out of the gene pool...
"Various estimates exist for the proportion, such as 1–4% or 3.4–7.9% in modern Eurasians, or 1.8–2.4% in modern Europeans and 2.3–2.6% in modern East Asians...
"Neanderthal [mitochondrial] DNA (which is passed on from mother to child) is absent in modern humans. This is evidence that interbreeding occurred mainly between Neanderthal males and modern human females.
"There is considerably less Neanderthal ancestry on the X-chromosome... The lack of Neanderthal-derived Y-chromosomes in modern humans (which is passed on from father to son), has also inspired the suggestions that the hybrids that contributed ancestry to modern populations were predominantly females, or that the Neanderthal Y-chromosome was not compatible with modern humans and became extinct."
I have a relatively high proportion of Neanderthal. I'm not sure if it creates additional health risks, but it's interesting to read the correlative research:
- We are more likely to be morning people.
- We have greater risk of sunburn.
- Higher likelihood of balding.
- Greater mechanical pain sensitivity.
- (Sometimes significant) effects on immune and antiviral responses.
- Some variants have increased risk of allergy.
- Some variants linked to larger lung capacity.
- Some associations with bone density.
- Neanderthal variants influence nose height and shape.
- Some variants linked to fewer miscarriages.
- Some variants associated with younger menopause.
- Strong statistical associations with smoking behaviour (more likely).
Am I reading it right that fear of heights is associated with Neanderthal ancestry? Wonder how much, substantively, more than people who carry none. I'm assuming with these genetic associations we're often talking small absolute effect sizes
A more popular example seems to be giant Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev, who sports some serious brow ridges and a lower forehead, but still has too much chin.
> In the 1990s hair-dragging rape scenes in the Clan of the Cave Bear novels (20 million copies sold by 1990) caused the books to be banned from American public libraries.
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
I remember it as portraying them using lots of subtle gesturing, sign language and slight head/posture changes to supplement sparse verbal communication, which made it seem like they knew what the other was thinking until you learned to decode it.
Did they actually have telepathic abilities in the book? Did I mentally erase that?
God damn. I read a bunch of them as a teenager and went back as an adult to read one of the later installments and I was pretty weirded out by domestic scenes that I can only describe as Flintstones-esque. It surprised me because I remembered the series having a reputation for being well researched (albeit some of that research was outdated by the time Shelters of Stone came out).
Likewise the sex scenes struck me as very frequent and drawn out. Odd to pivot that series to caveman themed romance novels!
AFAIR the shaman of the tribes have some psy/spiritual abilities, which actually connect with the rape bit, during some shamanic meetup (?) the religious leaders ee into the future... and the neanderthal/sapiens offspring is the only one who has one. I liked that bit.
Never read the books but I do remember my grandmother who owned them and my mother both telling me kids couldn’t read them while giving me full access to dragon riders of pern
> Ayla's main antagonist in the novel is Broud, son of the leader Brun, who feels that she takes credit and attention away from him. As the two mature, the hatred in Broud's heart festers. When they are young adults, he brutally rapes Ayla in a bid to demonstrate his total control over her; he continues to sexually assault her multiple times a day.
"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.
This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.
Does the model account for hybrid male sterility (Haldane's rule) and maternal-fetal incompatibility, or does it isolate mate choice as the primary driver of the lineage asymmetry?
Sahlins is one of the GOATS of modern anthropology
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
If the question is in response to the article's implication that 23andMe doesn't offer this anymore, that's not the case. They were bought by their original founder and continue to offer tests including a Neanderthal Ancestry Report.
Obvious rage bait aside, this is exactly what the author of the book presented in the article cautions against:
> The Neanderthal genome, he warns, remains ‘something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human’.
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aea6774
If that is the case, it may also be that male homo sapiens weren't strong enough to subdue neanderthal females.
Prejudice is natural, being able to fight the first hunch & against instinct, await & study more information is really hard. At least for me, it requires active effort.
It still happens today in armed conflict, so I don't know why you would think it would be less common amongst early humans operating without a moral framework.
All your active effort to study seems to be misleading you. Perhaps you are studying the wrong things?
Bigger issue seems to be that Neanderthal inbreeding between themselves as they were living without access to other pools of dna of humans and that most probably was a cause why they did not bounce back.
Wait, what's that Futurama, robot women and... OH NO!
Still humans.
HS are sometimes called "modern humans" to differentiate.
I find it more likely the admixture is from girls our ancestors went to take back who were already pregnant.
Yes? If that's how we see it for other groups animals, cultures, peoples, neandertals then why not for HNdrathals or so?
I lean your way of course, it’s not totally arbitrary, but where we draw a line tends to be a bit arbitrary.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
Here in Belgium my grandma was first to go work 2 municipalities away. Her parents were farmers. She cried when she came back and swore she would not go back the next day. Such a distant place was traveling to the end of the world to her i guess. Later they traveled to the south of france by bus and such but they never went beyond a neighbouring country. Still it's a thing her parents could only have dreamed of.
I think people have a bias by which they forget the massive technological advancements of recent years on one hand. And see the stories of travelers of the distant past on the norm on the other hand rather than things written about because they were so rare and interesting.
Most people stayed put untill you could pinpoint their location based on their genome and it influenced who you can get donor organs from. They repeatedly developed local cultures, languages and dialects in doing so.
>But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Those are not ethnic groups. The Flemish, the Vilamovians, the Germans, the Basques, the irish are examples of ethnic groups.
Idk if it's intentional but there seems to be this progressive shift/push that pushed nation to mean state and now makes it so some start using ethnicity instead of racial categorisation (which is a vague often even more arbitrary thing)
By appearance admixture is the one that defines looks and that includes racial look and it is question of mere 3 generations for descendants to look like anyone else around them, as that is where admixture differences are washed out. USA has a lot of issues in this matter, like with "one blood drop rule" that is still used in definitions of races and also cultural war issue, which is affecting rest of the world in these matters not to mention taboo subject of races.
It feels like it for you because you are used to man-made definitions of "race". US is for some historical reason a very race-aware culture.
Skin color for example is mostly related to exposure to the sun. When you go south in Northern hemisphere people become darker. But you call them "black" or "brown" for some reason. Or Africa is a giant continent. You call all the different people on it "black". They are just darker because they've adapted to the sun through generations.
US historically has people that have migrated from different continents. I live in a country (Turkey) where everyone is historically "mixed". There are blonde people, dark people, people with small eyes and large eyes. But they are all the same group of people. We're practically blind to superficial differences you call "race" or even ethnicity.
Also "mixed" doesn't mean the average color between black and white. They can have a dominant phenotype.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
What makes a "race" is basically just total nonsense. Arguably there should be many "races" in Africa given the genetic diversity.
> We all are the same species, but we also all are mixed races.
We're also all mixed-species.
Isn't this exactly what you'd expect? Historically travel between the more obvious-by-skin-color-and-features ethnically-different groups has been slow and hard with some exceptions.
So you'd expect to see the lines get erased first among groups that started out closest together, and that seems to match with Europe some and especially the US where the English/Irish/Italian/German/Spanish/etc flavors of "white" all frequently ended up in the same cities. You also see more broader mixes in the US since it's historically been more open for, and attractive to, the sort of immigration that would produce it than the "home" countries for many of those ethnicities.
Even when you have a diverse total population like in the US, you only get a few shots per generation for a person of background A to have kids with one of background B, so it's gonna be really really slow, even before factoring in cultural/political factors that have generally actively discouraged it (or made it illegal in living memory!). Even the mixing of white-European ethnicities was often quite controversial. But as it became more common most Americans lost the ability to even recognize the differences, since they were more subtle than "skin color."
Give it 400 years of affordable air travel and it could look very different in countries with historical or future high levels of in-migration.
[1] https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscien...
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Principal_component_...
Races has nothing to do with any of that - Neanderthals themselves seems to had different looks, depending on region they were living and had contacts with other humans - and we all were the same species.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
China's 1.0ish fertility rate means that they will be gone in 14 generations or so. India's not that far behind them. It's strange hearing people talk about the "erasure of races"... a meme that goes back 70 or more years at this point, when the only race that will be erased is the human race.
When fertility rates are 1.0, every subsequent human generation is half the size of the previous. Rapid population will become impossible to ignore in just a few decades. Human extinction looms.
https://xkcd.com/605/
Of course they'll change with time. They'll go down further. Not what you mean, you somehow believe they'll go back up... but without bothering to come up with an explanation for why they'd do that. Maybe because it's emotionally comfortable to imagine it so, or convenient to your argument.
In reality, low fertility rates cause economic stagnation that most believe to be the cause of even lower fertility rates. It will spiral.
"While 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives today, most people only carry about a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA, and most Neanderthal-derived DNA is non-coding. Neanderthals maintained a low genetic diversity and suffered from inbreeding depression; consequently most Neanderthal genes were probably selected out of the gene pool...
"Various estimates exist for the proportion, such as 1–4% or 3.4–7.9% in modern Eurasians, or 1.8–2.4% in modern Europeans and 2.3–2.6% in modern East Asians...
"Neanderthal [mitochondrial] DNA (which is passed on from mother to child) is absent in modern humans. This is evidence that interbreeding occurred mainly between Neanderthal males and modern human females.
"There is considerably less Neanderthal ancestry on the X-chromosome... The lack of Neanderthal-derived Y-chromosomes in modern humans (which is passed on from father to son), has also inspired the suggestions that the hybrids that contributed ancestry to modern populations were predominantly females, or that the Neanderthal Y-chromosome was not compatible with modern humans and became extinct."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics
- We are more likely to be morning people.
- We have greater risk of sunburn.
- Higher likelihood of balding.
- Greater mechanical pain sensitivity.
- (Sometimes significant) effects on immune and antiviral responses.
- Some variants have increased risk of allergy.
- Some variants linked to larger lung capacity.
- Some associations with bone density.
- Neanderthal variants influence nose height and shape.
- Some variants linked to fewer miscarriages.
- Some variants associated with younger menopause.
- Strong statistical associations with smoking behaviour (more likely).
Also he's a pretty good actor.
A more popular example seems to be giant Russian boxer Nikolai Valuev, who sports some serious brow ridges and a lower forehead, but still has too much chin.
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
But it's been so long ago, I may misremember.
Did they actually have telepathic abilities in the book? Did I mentally erase that?
Likewise the sex scenes struck me as very frequent and drawn out. Odd to pivot that series to caveman themed romance novels!
Therefore a useless comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clan_of_the_Cave_Bear
> Ayla's main antagonist in the novel is Broud, son of the leader Brun, who feels that she takes credit and attention away from him. As the two mature, the hatred in Broud's heart festers. When they are young adults, he brutally rapes Ayla in a bid to demonstrate his total control over her; he continues to sexually assault her multiple times a day.
No hair dragging, but something worse.
"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.
This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
I’m happy for him that his son continued in his footsteps
> The Neanderthal genome, he warns, remains ‘something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human’.
Maybe read an article before commenting on it.