I gotta admit, I would think that this new discovery would throw the theory of facial symmetry being attractive down the well. From archeological recreations of what Neanderthals looked like, they werent that attractive. Yet apparently our forebearers found them tolerable enough to sleep and have children with.
Thats what the de-coding of the Neanderthal genome proved early this month. It seems that 1 to 4% of the human genome in modern humans of non-African ancestry comes from this other species of humans. The fact that the Neanderthal DNA isnt found in Africans suggests that the inter breeding happened between 45,000 and 100,000 years ago. This is the time when non-African ancestors left Africa and began populating the planet.
The previous idea that modern humans simply hunted and competed Neanderthals to extinction was too simple, says Joao Zilhao of the University of Bristol, in Britain. More likely, our human ancestors mated with the primitve humans, which have since become extinct.
It seems that Asiatic people can also trace their DNA back to primitive humans. Human bones found in a cave near Beijing, China, have features typical of other Homo sapien species. Human artifacts have been found in Neanderthal dwellings.
I'm no biologist, but I know that when you cross a horse with a donkey, you get a mule, which are sterile and cant reproduce. Besides size, I think that a donkey and horse look pretty similar, but they are different enough that their offpring are uncapable of having mules. It seems that there are fewer differences between humans and Neanderthals than I would have thought. If their offspring had been sterile, we wouldnt be here.
Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627603.600-neanderthals-not-the-only-apes-humans-bred-with.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg20627603.600
No comments:
Post a Comment