Neanderthal in all

[neufer]

"Short, beetle-browed, powerfully built, with no chin and large (ears)." =>
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Neanderthal in all of us, DNA study indicates
David Perlman, SF Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, May 7, 2010

<<Only 10 years after scientists triumphantly decoded the human genome, an international research team has mapped the genes of the long-extinct Neanderthal people and report there's a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us. The remarkable finding could answer a question that has been hotly debated among anthropologists for decades: whether our human ancestors and the Neanderthals interbred some time after both species left Africa many thousands of years ago.

The report, published today in the journal Science, capped more than five years of intensive work by a group of 56 international scientists led by German paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo and Richard E. Green of UC Santa Cruz. Edward M. "Eddy" Rubin, director of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, called the major project "a terrific piece of work and a monumental endeavor,"

The project's scientists used tiny specks of powdered bone retrieved from three Neanderthal females who died in a Croatian cave more than 40,000 years ago to complete the draft of the Neanderthal genome. They then compared the genes to those of modern humans living today in five different regions of the world: France, Papua New Guinea, China, and southern and northern Africa.

Among their conclusions:

-- Humans living today carry between 1 and 4 percent of Neanderthal genes that carry the code for proteins in our bodies.

-- Those genes must have entered our lineage sometime during a 50,000-year period when the Neanderthals and humans left Africa through the Middle East and spread throughout Europe and Asia. The Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 years ago.

-- The complete genomes of the Neanderthals and modern humans, whose lineages separated from some unknown common ancestor at least 400,000 years ago, are 99.5 percent identical. They are, in fact, our closest evolutionary relatives. By comparison, humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genes.

The scientists analyzed 4 billion units of Neanderthal DNA, called nucleotides - at least 60 percent of the Neanderthal's entire genome. While incomplete, Pääbo told reporters during a teleconference this week that 60 percent "is a very good statistical sample of the entire genome."

Finding the Neanderthal genes in people living today provides "compelling" evidence that thousands of years ago some interbreeding occurred between the two species, Green said. "The sequencing of Neanderthal genetic material is real gold because we can now compare the Neanderthal genome with our own and pinpoint the genetic changes that have enabled humans to thrive, to spread across the entire globe, and to occupy every ecological niche that exists in the world," he said.

Green's group reported finding at least five genes in modern humans where natural selection apparently gave humans an evolutionary advantage over the Neanderthals. They include genes involved in mental development, in converting food into energy, and in developing the skull, the rib cage, and other parts of the human skeleton. In some of those genes lie many of the reasons the Neanderthals appear so different from humans despite the similarity of our genomes. Archaeologists have described them as short, beetle-browed, powerfully built, with no chin and large noses. Yet they made sophisticated stone tools and used animal skins for clothing.

Detecting the genes of the Neanderthals, dead so long ago, has been notoriously difficult because their bones have long been overwhelmingly contaminated by microbial infection. But the technology for isolating genetic material from ancient tissue has advanced so swiftly in recent years to make it feasible, Green said. Pääbo and his colleagues reported isolating the first few snippets of Neanderthal genes only four years ago. At that same time, Rubin and his colleagues at the Genome Institute in Walnut Creek reported sequencing a small group of similar Neanderthal genes using a different technique.

Rubin was not part of the Pääbo team, but after reading the new report, he was impressed. "It's the first glimpse of a freeway for us to go back and forth between the Neanderthal genome and ours to study our own evolution," he said.

However, Richard G. Klein, a noted archaeologist at Stanford who has long worked on the evolution of Neanderthals and humans, has serious reservations about the work. He is known for his research into the fossil record showing how modern humans replaced the Neanderthals throughout Europe thousands of years ago. The Pääbo group's report, he said, "contradicts everything we know about the archaeological record. Their evidence is really wobbly and it bothers me a lot. But it's very important stuff if it's right - and I really do hope it's right.">>
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[bystander]

Discover Blogs / Gene Expression / Neandertal
Discover Blogs / 80beats / Neanderthals
Discover Blogs / The Loom / Skull Caps and Genomes
Science / Special Feature / The Neandertal Genome

[wonderboy]

Since this is a Gene. Is there any possibility of this Gene being more prominent in some folk than others. For example, those with monobrows or enhanced brows or both. Those that are freakishly large.

Theres an Indian actor (I think he is indian but indian in the sense that thats where he is from, he isn't in bollywood or that) who is remarkably huge, hes usually in films chucking things around etc and he has neanderthal features.

For example the great Khali:

[neufer]

Since this is a Gene. Is there any possibility of this Gene being more prominent in some folk than others. For example, those with monobrows or enhanced brows or both. Those that are freakishly large.

Those SHORT with NO CHIN

[wonderboy]

I'm not saying they have to have all the features. I'm just saying that they could be enhanced causing features of neanderthals to be more pronounced than on a person whos genes are "normal." I say "normal" because now that we know there is a neanderthal gene within us, its normal to have it.

Paul

[neufer]

I'm not saying they have to have all the features. I'm just saying that they could be enhanced causing features of neanderthals to be more pronounced than on a person whose genes are "normal." I say "normal" because now that we know there is a neanderthal gene within us, its normal to have it.

Not if your ancestors were African.

<<The Neandertal is a small valley of the river Düssel in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, located about 12 km east of Düsseldorf. During the 19th century the valley was called Neandershöhle (Neander's Hollow), and after 1850 Neanderthal (Neander Valley). It was named after Joachim Neander, a 17th-century German pastor. Neander is the Greek translation of his family name Neumann — both names meaning "new man". He lived nearby in Düsseldorf and loved the valley for giving him the inspiration for his compositions.>>

[BMAONE23]

Some interesting comparative info
http://scienceguy288.wordpress.com/2009 ... e-friends/

[neufer]

Some interesting comparative info
http://scienceguy288.wordpress.com/2009 ... e-friends/

<<Scientists state, it was probably competition for resources which forced the Neanderthal die off.
They are not saying that there was a Cro-magnon/Neanderthal war.>>

• "To Serve Neanderthal"
  (a.k.a. "Fill a Magnon")

[neufer]

Neanderthals made leather-working tools like those in use today
Archaic humans may have invented bone implements still used to make expensive handbags.
Ewen Callaway, Nature, 12 August 2013

[b][color=#0000FF]A bone tool found in a cave in southwestern France suggests Neanderthals had sophisticated ways of working leather.[/color][/b]

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<<Excavations of Neanderthal sites more than 40,000 years old have uncovered a kind of tool that leather workers still use to make hides more lustrous and water resistant. The bone tools, known as lissoirs, had previously been associated only with modern humans. The latest finds indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans might have invented the tools independently.

The first of the lissoir fragments surfaced a decade ago at a rock shelter called Pech-de-l’Azé in the Dordogne region of southwest France. Archaeologist Marie Soressi of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, knew the tool at once, says her colleague Shannon McPherron.

The tools are also known as slickers and burnishers, says McPherron. Soressi contacted luxury-goods manufacturer Hermès in Paris, and found that their high-end leather workers use just such a tool. “She showed them a picture, and they recognized it instantly,” says McPherron. The company's line includes the wildly popular Birkin handbag, which sells for around US$10,000 and upwards.

McPherron says that a single artefact, however, was not enough for the researchers to draw broad conclusions. “You find one, and there’s always some doubt. You’re worried that it’s not a pattern — that it’s anecdotal behaviour.” But subsequent digs at Pech-de-l’Azé and nearby Abri Peyrony turned up further lissoir fragments, leading the researchers to conclude that Neanderthals made the tools routinely.

The lissoirs are not the first Neanderthal bone tools ever discovered. But McPherron says that they stand out from others: most bone tools are facsimiles of stone tools, but lissoirs take advantage of the physical properties of bone, such as its texture and ability to bend without breaking. Neanderthals probably fashioned the lissoirs from the long, flexible ribs of deer.
Skins and bones

The researchers cannot be certain that Neanderthals used the bone tools to burnish hides. But McPherron points out that his team found only the tips of tools, which may have broken off after polishing leather. Furthermore, the team created its own lissoirs and used them to smooth a dry hide, generating small ridges on the implements similar to those found on the Neanderthal tools. The team's work is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

McPherron says that the origin of the lissoirs is likely to be the most contentious aspect. There is little doubt that the tools belonged to Neanderthals, because modern humans did not live in Pech-de-l’Azé or Abri Peyrony. But uncertainties surrounding the age of the artefacts make it difficult to determine whether modern humans learned to make lissoirs by copying Neanderthals, or vice versa — or if the two closely related species invented the bone tools independently.

Different techniques dated the two sites to between 51,000 and 41,000 years old. The most recent date overlaps with the earliest known modern-human occupations of western Europe 42,000 years ago, but most archaeologists agree that only Neanderthals called Europe home at the time of the earliest date. McPherron is now looking for lissoirs at even older Neanderthal sites to settle the confusion.

Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, UK, thinks that the tools precede the arrival of Homo sapiens to Europe, so their presence “cannot be an isolated occurrence, but was part of an indigenous Neanderthal tradition”. The tools also point to the sophistication of Neanderthal fashions, Pettitt says — if not their taste in handbags.>>

[stephen63]

Since this is a Gene. Is there any possibility of this Gene being more prominent in some folk than others. For example, those with monobrows or enhanced brows or both. Those that are freakishly large.

Those SHORT with NO CHIN

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[Ann]

• "To Serve Neanderthal"
  (a.k.a. "Fill a Magnon")

Funny, but there were probably more Neanderthal steaks servad to Cro-Magnon people than vice versa. Otherwise, why are we still here and they aren't?

(Of course, if our species interbred, then in a way the Neanderthals are still here.)

Ann