Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Neanderthal gene flow was mostly one way

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email
Neanderthal upper molar/I. Crevecoeur

From ScienceDaily:

The team also compared these Neandertal genomes to the genomes of people living today, and showed that all of the late Neandertals were more similar to the Neandertals that contributed DNA to present-day people living outside Africa than an older Neandertal from Siberia. Intriguingly, even though four of the Neandertals lived at a time when modern humans had already arrived in Europe they do not carry detectable amounts of modern human DNA. “It may be that gene flow was mostly unidirectional, from Neandertals into modern humans,” says Svante Pääbo, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“Our work demonstrates that the generation of genome sequences from a large number of archaic human individuals is now technically feasible, and opens the possibility to study Neandertal populations across their temporal and geographical range,” says Janet Kelso, the senior author of the new study. Paper. (paywall) – Mateja Hajdinjak, Qiaomei Fu, Alexander Hübner, Martin Petr, Fabrizio Mafessoni, Steffi Grote, Pontus Skoglund, Vagheesh Narasimham, Hélène Rougier, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Patrick Semal, Marie Soressi, Sahra Talamo, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Ivan Gušić, Željko Kućan, Pavao Rudan, Liubov V. Golovanova, Vladimir B. Doronichev, Cosimo Posth, Johannes Krause, Petra Korlević, Sarah Nagel, Birgit Nickel, Montgomery Slatkin, Nick Patterson, David Reich, Kay Prüfer, Matthias Meyer, Svante Pääbo, Janet Kelso. Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals. Nature, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/nature26151 More.

It isn’t very surprising if the gene flow was mostly unidirectional, assuming that Neandertals were less numerous than migrants. People must form relationships with someone if they want to have a family. Maybe not the person they had expected.

See also: Researchers: Modern humans “interbred with” Denisovans twice

Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents

and

A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?

Comments
I think this is another example pointing bottleneck caused by the Global Flood mentioned in the Bible. Reich's new book "Who we are - and how we got here" muddies the "out of Africa" story. A quote from a book reviewer (believes in evolution)at National Review says "A similar dynamic of replacement or mixture applies to Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In other words, the vast majority of the world’s populations date to migrations and mixing within the last 10,000 years. Even characteristics that we think to be fundamental and primal, such as the fair complexion of modern Northern Europeans, are likely a recent phenomenon, driven by the mixing of disparate genes 4,000 to 5,000 years ago and reshaped by natural selection over the next few thousand years" Coming from a "Bible is true" viewpoint, I think further genetic research will continue pointing us back the Noah bottleneck that happened about 4,500 years ago. Juwilkerjuwilker
March 26, 2018
March
03
Mar
26
26
2018
12:06 PM
12
12
06
PM
PDT
The THIRTY-ONE authors of that paper represent a pretty fair cross-section of the Indo-European stock, from Finland to India. It would be more interesting to see a geographic heat-map of the Neanderthal genes in those 31 people. Plenty of studies claim to be a cross-section of some population using a much smaller N of subjects.polistra
March 22, 2018
March
03
Mar
22
22
2018
02:03 AM
2
02
03
AM
PDT

Leave a Reply