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Theres so much information turning up, regarding the ancestry of modern humans, that its correlation must be a full time job. So, I'm just posting this find for Terry and others to digest. http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKN0127154220071001
.  . "You will never find a real Human being - Even in a mirror." ....Mike Kremer.
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Thanks Mike. It's not surprising. Once they'd adapted to life on the steppe there was nothing to stop them reaching the Altai Mountains. I notice the article stays right away from why they disappeared. Getting wary of comparisons to European displacement of indigenous populations over the last 400 years? "We were superior". Suspiciously similar to ideas of white supremacy.
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I think it was a shame that such a magnificant species like the Neanderthals had to go extinct. I am not certain if they were competing with Modern Humans or if there was a viable trade among the two species, but I sort of suspect both, and this is just my opinion, but I think that the Neanderthal was so specially adapted to the cold weather that their reproductive systems may have also been adapted and when the weather warmed up they could not reproduce fast enough. Again this is just my opinion.
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Rallem. I suspect they were much less different from us than you imagine.
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Well if their skeletons are noticably different, then wouldn't they have to be? I understand that they could breed with modern man as well, but the offspring were like mules and were sterile, but I wonder if there were loopholes like with the Liger. I understand that if a male lion and female tiger then its young if it were a female could have children. (This is going by memory so I will not swear to this combination's fertility, but I am sure there is one combination of lion and tiger offspring which can bear children, and the rest are sterile like mules.
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Well I came here of discuss an article I found while researching a topic for school: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/autism_evolution.shtmlThen I realized the article was written July 2005. Oh well, I guess I am a little late but it would be helpful to figure out how to maneuver around these forums.
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In this article we are discussing neanderthals and in another woolly mammoths. Do you think we are going a little too ice age happy here?
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Rallem wrote:
"they could breed with modern man as well, but the offspring were like mules and were sterile".
There's no way we can know if that was true. It's just a theory someone thought up as possible support for the belief that they didn't form hybrids. However we do know they swapped technology so they presumably interacted in some way. Just because their skeletons were a bit different doesn't at all prove they couldn't hybridise. Breeds of dog look very different but have no trouble forming hybrids, as many pedigree breeders know to their cost.
Also; "I will not swear to this combination's fertility". As species drift apart in their ability to form hybrids usually the male hybrids become infertile before females. It's not usually the direction of the hybrid, i.e. male horse, female donkey or the other way round. Some female mules are fertile but have to be bred back to either a horse or donkey male to produce offspring. Hybrids between bison, cattle and yaks are another example of the phenomenon.
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Rallem wrote:
"they could breed with modern man as well, but the offspring were like mules and were sterile".
There's no way we can know if that was true. It's just a theory someone thought up as possible support for the belief that they didn't form hybrids. However we do know they swapped technology so they presumably interacted in some way. Just because their skeletons were a bit different doesn't at all prove they couldn't hybridise. Breeds of dog look very different but have no trouble forming hybrids, as many pedigree breeders know to their cost.
Also; "I will not swear to this combination's fertility". As species drift apart in their ability to form hybrids usually the male hybrids become infertile before females. It's not usually the direction of the hybrid, i.e. male horse, female donkey or the other way round. Some female mules are fertile but have to be bred back to either a horse or donkey male to produce offspring. Hybrids between bison, cattle and yaks are another example of the phenomenon. Enough is known about dna and enough dna has been recovered from the fossils of neanderthal man to know that their dna was too different from ours. This is from recollection though of a television show on the learning channel or one of its affiliates, so I will not attest to my message earlier, because some of the shows reasoning seemed flawed to me.
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Forum Cruiser:
Next time, start a new thread with a new topic. Autism and Asperger's syndrome have nothing to do with woolly mammoths or Neanderthals. Feel free to start a new discussion topic. Just don't hijack the topic in the middle of a thread.
Thanks,
Amaranth
If you don't care for reality, just wait a while; another will be along shortly. --A Rose
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Rallem. It's impossible to tell just from looking at DNA if any two releted species can form fertile hybrids, so the basic premise of the TV show was flawed. If you can find an example I'd be very interested. It's sometimes possible, if you know in advance the subspecies are incapable of forming fertile hybrids, of finding the genes responsible for the incompatibility. I have maintained for many years that ideas of modern human genetic uniqueness are based mainly on widely held cultural beliefs rather than an honest examination of the evidence.
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Well if their skeletons are noticably different, then wouldn't they have to be? I understand that they could breed with modern man as well, but the offspring were like mules and were sterile, . where did you hear that? I recently saw an article that states humans and neanderthals are over 99% genetically the same....so why in the world coulnd't they breed and produce viable, fertile offspring?
Last edited by sergio; 10/07/07 01:55 AM.
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Perhaps because of the 1% bit?
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The most common cause of infertility in hybrid offspring is due to the chromosome number being different in the parents, so that when it comes to meiosis one or more chromosomes doesn't have anything to match up with, and the process breaks down there. Horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes, which is the cause of most infertile offspring. In a rare occasion, unpaired chromosomes get pulled into one of the gametes, thus providing it with a normal number of chromosomes. This happens very rarely, however.
If you don't care for reality, just wait a while; another will be along shortly. --A Rose
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The most common cause of infertility in hybrid offspring is due to the chromosome number being different in the parents, so that when it comes to meiosis one or more chromosomes doesn't have anything to match up with, and the process breaks down there. Horses and donkeys have different numbers of chromosomes, which is the cause of most infertile offspring. In a rare occasion, unpaired chromosomes get pulled into one of the gametes, thus providing it with a normal number of chromosomes. This happens very rarely, however. oh, can you verify that Neanderthals and modern humans have different numbers of chromosomes?
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It would be difficult to verify the chromosome numbers without sample on hand of living tissue. You scare up the Neanderthal, then we can do the test.
If you don't care for reality, just wait a while; another will be along shortly. --A Rose
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And even if they did have a different number of chromosomes that is no guarantee they couldn't produce fertile offspring. The Mongolian wild horse has 33 pairs of chromosomes and the domestic horse has 32. Yet the greatest threat facing Przewalskii's horse is interbreeding with domestic horses.
According to a literal view of mitochondrial DNA evidence Neanderthals and modern humans separated just half a million years ago. Most pairs of species with separation times of less than a million years are quite capable of successfully forming fertile hybrids. There is no reason at all to suppose humans and Neanderthals were incapable of it. If Neanderthal genes are indeed extinct there is some other reason. As I've said before perhaps human enthusiasm for genocide goes back a long way.
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I think that we are now beating a dead horse here.
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Probably. But examining theories about why, or if, Neanderthal genes died out will surely tell us a great deal about our evolution and has relevance in regard to our behavior towards other groups today.
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