Page 2 of 5

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Fri Jun 07, 2013 8:10 am
by desertrat
The First Time Our Ancestors Ate Meat?
Eating meat linked to the evolution of a bigger brain? Take that vegetarians!!!
:stirpot:

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Thu Apr 17, 2014 7:38 am
by mrfish
Eating Meat: I'm surprised no one objected to that one! Usually vegetarians get all defensive when you start talking about deficiencies in their diets. Apparently there aren't any vegetarians posting on this message board!

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Sun May 18, 2014 8:24 am
by cactuspete
Neanderthals And Modern Humans
More and more information becomes available all the time about our ancient ancestors. Those of us of European descent can count Neanderthals as ancestors. How many genes we carry of Neanderthal origin is debatable and as yet to be determined, but most likely our cognitive skills were actually enhanced as a result of the Neanderthal contribution.
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.

LINK: http://blog.23andme.com/news/neanderthals-and-modern-humans

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Fri Jun 27, 2014 8:52 am
by wildrose
What Discovery of Oldest Human Poop Reveals About Neanderthals' Diet :poop:
Maybe what they ate had something to do with why they became extinct. Not that they are actually entirely extinct since their genes live on in most of us of European ancestry.
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.

LINK: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140625-neanderthal-poop-diet-ancient-science-archaeology/

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 9:32 am
by wildrose
Neanderthals Are People, Too
The key question is what impact did the inclusion of non-human DNA have on those carrying that DNA? Was it beneficial?
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.

LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/neanderthals-are-people-too.html

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Sat Jul 11, 2015 6:04 pm
by wildrose
My Neanderthal sex secret: modern European's great-great grandparent link
It's almost like a steamy tabloid sexpose, but it happened 40,000 years ago!
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

Here's a particularly intriguing assertion from the article:
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.

LINK: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/22/my-neanderthal-sex-secret-modern-europeans-great-great-grandparent-link

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Mon Aug 03, 2015 7:26 am
by cactuspete
Neanderthals had outsize effect on human biology
More info on the effects of Neanderthal, Denisovan, and Melanesian DNA on modern humans. It seems to be a case of some good news and some bad news.
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.

LINK: http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-had-outsize-effect-on-human-biology-1.18086

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Thu Aug 06, 2015 7:27 am
by recluse
I agree with those who assert that Neanderthal genes are responsible for increasing the intelligence of humans of European ancestry. I think the same can be said for Denisovan or Melanesian genes and Asians. At this point it seems pretty clear that humans who stayed in Africa did not benefit from this boost in intelligence.

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Sun Sep 13, 2015 10:38 am
by sandman
How Do We Know Who Our Human Ancestors Were?
Lots of science talk about fossils, ancestors, and all that stuff.

Re: Cloning A Neanderthal

PostPosted: Sat Mar 05, 2016 8:52 am
by panamint_patty
Evidence mounts for interbreeding bonanza in ancient human species
Our evolutionary history is slowly being untangled.
“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.

And this is pretty interesting too:
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.

http://www.nature.com/news/evidence-mounts-for-interbreeding-bonanza-in-ancient-human-species-1.19394