https://phys.org/news/2020-04-modern-humans-neanderthals-tangled-genetic.html In recent years, scientists have uncovered evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals share a tangled past. In the course of human history, these two species of hominins interbred not just once, but at multiple times, the thinking goes. A new study supports this notion, finding that people in Eurasia today have genetic material linked to Neanderthals from the Altai mountains in modern-day Siberia. This is noteworthy because past research has shown that Neanderthals connected to a different, distant location—the Vindija Cave in modern-day Croatia—have also contributed DNA to modern-day Eurasian populations. The results reinforce the concept that Neanderthal DNA has been woven into the modern human genome on multiple occasions as our ancestors met Neanderthals time and again in different parts of the world. The study was published on March 31 in the journal Genetics. "It's not a single introgression of genetic material from Neanderthals," says lead researcher Omer Gokcumen, a University at Buffalo biologist. "It's just this spider web of interactions that happen over and over again, where different ancient hominins are interacting with each other, and our paper is adding to this picture. This project will now add to an emerging chorus — we've been looking into this phenomenon for a couple of years, and there are a couple of papers that came out recently that deal with similar concepts." more at link..... the paper: https://www.genetics.org/content/early/2020/03/31/genetics.120.303167 Analysis of Haplotypic Variation and Deletion Polymorphisms Point to Multiple Archaic Introgression Events, Including from Altai Neanderthal Lineage: Abstract The time, extent, and genomic impact of the introgressions from archaic humans into ancestors of extant human populations remain one of the most exciting venues of population genetics research in the last decade. Several studies have shown population-specific signatures of introgression events from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and potentially other unknown hominin populations in different human groups. Moreover, it was shown that these introgression events may have contributed to phenotypic variation in extant humans, with biomedical and evolutionary consequences. In this study, we present a comprehensive analysis of the unusually divergent haplotypes in the Eurasian genomes and showed that they can be traced back to multiple introgression events. In parallel, we document hundreds of deletion polymorphisms shared with Neanderthals. A locus-specific analysis of one such shared deletion suggests the existence of a direct introgression event from the Altai Neanderthal lineage into the ancestors of extant East Asian populations. Overall, our study is in agreement with the emergent notion that various Neanderthal populations contributed to extant human genetic variation in a population-specific manner.
I read heaps on humans as I find it just so interesting. So I am really happy when you post this sort of thing. Alex
One things common to all humans but different from all other great apes is the number of chromosomes. This probably marks the split and the start of the new branch of Homo Sapiens. Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes Alec MacAndrew http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm
Maybe worth continuing. Chromosome 2 IMO, this major mutation marks the creation and split of humans from the common ancestor. As described mutations like this alter the a actual growth blueprint in the DNA coding. As the main difference between apes and man is mostly cosmetic except for one large difference, is the brain size and complexity in brain folds, it seems to me that is perfectly reasonable to assign the mutation of chromosome 2 as the cause for increased intelligence and the drift apart from our nearest relations.
