iirc this has been known for a while. We had sex with them so much that they stopped existing as a separate species.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
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Garrison would be proud. We truly fucked them to death.
The ones we didn't kill. The more violent killing species is the one that survived. Yay us.
We have evidence of interbreeding, but how much evidence do we have of violence between humansnand neanderthals?
Iirc there are no Neanderthal Y-chromosomes left, but there are X-chromosomes, suggesting we killed the males & took the females
This... doesn't really match my understanding.
IIRC there wasn't any real trend. Men and women of either species interbred.
Nothing concrete I don't think. But we do have many thousands of years of racial violence in our collective history so it's not a huge leap of a guess.
I guess the evidence would come in the history of areas or sites where one group displaced another, perhaps leaving signs of a takeover. I have seen documentaries discussing the differences of the species, and how ours wasn't the physically stronger, but our brain enabled us to plan and communicate better in a conflict or attack. I don't know if that was based on evidence or just speculation using the characteristics we know of the two species.
yes, and the article mentions it.
if you are on the fence about reading - its a medium length, layman accessible, enjoyable read.
Resulting in me and my 2 percent Neanderthal DNA
I know a few
I definitely know someone who is descended from a neanderthal.
Most likely your mother
Oh, gottem!
No it is, in fact, very likely that his mother has some neanderthal dna. Most of us do
Shut up, nerd. Let us settle this the way our ancestors intended.
E: Nvm, humor is dead.
Iβve got a bit of Neanderthal DNA, and a lot of folks of Eastern European descent do as well. My ancestors were swingers, I guess.
There's a fantastic youtube channel by Stephan Milo that does nothing but explore the origins of "humans" (in the very broad sense).
Im roughly 2 percent
Post your browline
I can't get th3 camera far enough away to capture it all
How were we able to procreate with a different species? Are there other instances of this in nature?
I thought mating two species created sterile offspring (mules).
Simply put, it's not that simple.
That just depends on how the chromosomes match A mule is sterile only because it has 63 chromosomes. A horse has 64 and donkey has 62. .
https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2007/ask225/
Its amazing what you learn for a school paper decades that sticks with you.
There are examples of 2 distinct species (with different chromosome count) creating (sometimes) fertile offspring: https://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/when-hybrids-are-fertile-3/
But genetically the neanderthalers were far less different from us than those examples. Apparently all modern humans share 99.9% of DNA and neanderthalers shared 99.7% of that. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/are-neanderthals-and-homo-sapiens-the-same-species
So the no viable offspring rule might not be that good for differentiating species, but that also doesn't mean that neanderthalers and us were not the same species. The more I read on it, the more I think that we were. Apparently we interbred quite a lot over the millennia.
Is there any way to tell if certain gender-pairs were more common in interspecies mating between sapiens and neanderthals? For example, are we able to tell if the male partner was more or less likely to be sapien or neanderthal?
I think that might be possible with mitochondrial dna (it always comes from the mother), but I only found 1 speculative source that draws a conclusion: "Nobody today has mitochondrial DNA like that in Neanderthals and, since itβs passed only maternally, this implies that interbreeding was more often between their men and our women." https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-neanderthal-women
It's an essay, not a research paper, I wouldn't bet any money on this conclusion being correct.
Coincidentally just just watched this Gutsick Gibbon (primatologist) vid which touches on this a bit (though not the main topic). https://youtu.be/dy7_LousWVo
Well, this newfound knowledge could have us decide that Neanderthals were not a different species, actually.