The First Time Our Ancestors Ate Meat?
Eating meat linked to the evolution of a bigger brain? Take that vegetarians!!!
BioCentury This Week has done a nice series of interviews with Svante Pääbo, the director of evolutionary genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was also the first to decode the Neanderthal genome.
Want the real poop on the Paleolithic Diet? Discovery of the oldest human fecal fossils, some 50,000 years old, suggests that Neanderthals balanced their meat-heavy diet with plenty of veggies.
The ancient genomes also revealed that Neanderthals and Denisovans mixed with the direct ancestors of present-day people after they came out of Africa. So if your roots are in Europe or Asia, between 1 and 2 percent of your DNA comes from Neanderthals, and if you are from Papua New Guinea or other parts of Oceania, an additional 4 percent of your DNA comes from Denisovans.
Genetic tests on one of earliest Europeans living 40,000 years ago finds unusually high DNA levels to reveal sex with Neanderthal only four generations earlier
Though present day humans have at most only a few percent Neanderthal DNA each, when added together, the global population carries about a fifth of the Neanderthal genome.
The proportion of the human genome that comes from archaic relatives is small. The genomes of most Europeans and Asians are 2–4% Neanderthal, with Denisovan DNA making up about 5% of the genomes of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians. DNA slivers from other distant relatives probably pepper a variety of human genomes.
“There is this joke in the population genetics community — there’s always one more interbreeding event," Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA.
The mystery species could be an Asian offshoot of Homo erectus, which lived in Indonesia, perhaps as recently as 100,000 years ago, or possibly even relatives of Homo floresiensis, the 'hobbit' species discovered more than a decade ago on an Indonesian island. “We’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” one evolutionary geneticist told Nature when the findings were presented at a conference in 2013.
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