Are we all Neanderthals? Did Neanderthals influence the modern human genome?
One of those big questions that has been hanging around for a long time in Physical Anthro (long before Quest for Fire and Clan of the Cave Bear) is the whole Homo sapiens and Neanderthal question. Originally it was thought that Neanderthals were part of our genetic/evoloutionary line. Then it turned out we were all hanging around at the same time. So … how did Neanderthals (a dead-end on the whole Homo sapiens line) influence our genetic makeup? Was there significant interbreeding and intermixing? Looks like … no. Sure it appears to have happened (this should come as no surprise), but not to an extent that Neanderthal DNA is around today.
Quirks and Quarks looked into this last week and talked about some of the recent work to sequence the Neanderthal genome:
All very well, but of course there is another line of evidence from genetics that shows no signs of the mixing that Trinkaus has found. Over the past several years German and American researchers have been scavenging Neanderthal DNA from samples of bone, in an attempt to reconstruct the entire Neanderthal genome. This is a hugely ambitious project, since it’s only been a few years since we’ve been able to retrieve any DNA from fossils at all, and what we have retrieved has been tiny fragments. Nevertheless, the work has reaped enough DNA that it can be compared to modern human DNA. Those results so far show that there are no distinctly Neanderthal genetic codes in today’s human genome. In other words, according to the genetic work, if humans and Neanderthals ever did interbreed, then not only are the Neanderthals extinct, then so are the Neanderthal-human hybrids.
This, of course, doesn’t prove Neanderthals and humans didn’t mix — only that as far as we can tell the mixture wasn’t particularly successful, as it didn’t persist into modern times. The genetic work isn’t yet complete, though, so there may still be some chance that the Neanderthals have lived on. Certainly spending any game night in a sports bar provides some powerful anecdotal evidence for the case.
Like many things in science, I wouldn’t call this case closed. There very well could be sub-populations in the world with some Neanderthal DNA hanging around, but it will take a lot more work finding ancient samples to work with to figure that out