Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum The Neandertal Genome

"Recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have provided initial glimpses of the nuclear genome of Neandertals as well as other ancient mammals including cave bears and mammoths. In the 7 May 2010 issue of Science, an international team of researchers presents the draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals."

http://www.sciencemag.org/special/neandertal/feature/index.html

Podcast and transcript here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/764-b

It's estimated that about 2% of H. sapiens genome (throughout the world) appears to inherited from H. neanderthalensis. This is taken as confirmation that interbreeding was not merely localised, and occurred prior to H. sapiens migration beyond the range of the latter.

I was surprised to learn that Neanderthals had slightly larger brains than we have. Not having studied the subject, I had the impression - a common one maybe - that they were less intelligent. Probably not true. I wonder what kind of world this would be had they survived instead of us. Well, genetic differences between the two species can now be identified, which may eventually reveal some indicators regarding differences in behaviour.

I thought that brain size did not indicate intelligence, rather the intelligence lies in the way the brain is used, (as in the relative size of the male/female brain!)

I thought that this was an interesting discovery and it answers the question of possible inter-breeding which was debated here some time ago.

However I am far from expert in this field and hope to hear from Mike on this topic soon!

That's right, there is evidence that in our species, brain size is unrelated to intelligence:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-10/970880334.Ns.r.html

But between species..from wiki:

"When comparing different species the ratio of brain weight to body weight does present a correlation with intelligence"

Any such correlation is a generalisation, but:

"For example, the ratio of brain weight to body weight...

for fish is 1:5000;
for reptiles it is about 1:1500;
for birds, 1:220;
for most mammals, 1:180
and for humans, 1:50."

Late edit!

"Neandertal...average brain size is slightly larger than that of modern humans, about 1450 cc, but this is probably correlated with their greater bulk."

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.html

I guess that puts them, potentially, on a par with ourselves.

Rede, your link on the talk origins site kept timing out so I couldn't follow it. Do you have another, or is the site abnormally busy at 5 am?

Maybe just busy, Rose, taking hits from other time zones. I've just checked the link and the page opened within a second or two.

Thanks, rede. I was able to get to the link with no problem this morning. Very interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Rede-- that ratio makes sense. The link seems OK here.

The discovery sheds light on the vanishing of the Neanderthals to some extent. As it seems that a fair proportion of the Northern European early human descendants have a small amount of Neanderthal genetic inheritance, their ancestors have not so much vanished as been absorbed!

Right. Fascinating to consider that Mr White and Mrs Wong are both part Neanderthal.

What I've read in the past has always smugly implied that modern humans "out-competed" Neanderthals by using "advanced" intellectual abilities such as "imagination", which we have to thank for the existence of religion and other things that have long been employed to encourage people to be stupid rather than intelligent!

Yes well I am fairly sure in my mind that the Neandertals were out competed. They were quietly disposed of by the flint chipping knappers that came after them, killed off, or starved.
You can go back thousands of years, 20 or 25 thousand years since the beginning of cave painting. Earliest paintings were all first drawn by the artistic Neanderthals. They even dabbed ochre spots on cave walls, to represent stars in the sky. Beads and stones were decorated by Neanderthals living in south african caves.
I believe they were more artistic and gentle, than the meat eating, flint knappers

http://www.mazzaroth.com/ChapterOne/LascauxCave.htm

Plus there are much earlier cave drawings than Lascaux.

Current evidence says

(a) Neanderthals never lived in South Africa (or any other part of Africa)
(b) They became extinct by 30,000 BCE - Edit: Well, not exactly, it seems:

"A study in Nature magazine suggests the species may have lived in Gorham's Cave on Gibraltar up to 24,000 years ago...But evidence for a presence 24,000 years ago is limited, so the researchers can only say with confidence that Neanderthals were in the cave until 28,000 years ago."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5343266.stm (2006)

Mike, from your link:

"Wheston Price also made the identification of 10 painted dots on a Neanderthal cave painting with the Pleiades...His idea that the Pleiades were depicted in the Lascaux cave..."

Yet the Lascaux cave paintings date back only 17,000 yrs, right? What have I missed?

Well I definately rem reading about Neandertals producing painted beads. That were found in a south african cave.

I dont think there was any definate dividing line betwenn Neanderthal and any other Homo Sapiens living at the time.

Steady assimilation, or violent warfare between the groups was probably the order of the seasons.
Which is why the scientists now tell us that a lot of us have Neothal Genes in our make up.

Now theres another thing to work on.
What type of human characteur are you, if you possess Neothal genes ?

Verification of Neanderthals living in that region should have resulted in range maps very different from the one shown in the following link:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7164/fig_tab/nature06193_F1.html

Moreover, it would have to account for the fact that Neanderthal genes are found only in non-Africans.


Yes, toward the end of the Neanderthal era, that was probably true - we can see, today, that the Neanderthal gene pool was greatly diluted - but any claim regarding the art of neanderthalensis v sapiens can only be justified on the basis that a clear species distinction existed at the time the art was produced. Researchers seem to think that such a distinction did exist.

The scientist behind the Neanderthal genome project said he's certain that Neanderthals and our ancestors had sex.

yet it does seem that European men tend to have thicker semi-brow ridges and jawbones than other groups

Moreover, many anthropologists I've spoken with are agnostic on whether Neanderthals and humans ever had sex. The more important question, as Pääbo notes, is to what extent and whether or not it contributed anything to ours -- and their -- genetic diversity.

Yet the two species seem to have lived close together in parts of Europe and the Middle East, so it is not impossible to imagine that Neanderthals and humans met on occasions

"I'm sure in a way that they had sex, but what I'm interested in was it productive in the sense of giving offspring that contributed to us, and that I think we'll be able to answer quite rigorously with the genome sequence we'll have," said Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, during a recent conference.

Pääbo's team is expected to publish a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome by year's end, but it's unclear whether or not there is any indication of admixture

Preliminary analysis of the nuclear genome has turned up no sign of inbreeding. "There's no positive evidence that it occurred at all," Pääbo said in a February press conference
So why is Pääbo so sure that Neanderthals and humans shared a bed?
His public comments give no indication that the genome sequence offers this proof, and one member of Paabo's team involved in this analysis that I contacted declined to comment until the genome sequence is published. Fair enough. The data analysis is extremely complex and it ought to be vetted by peer reviewers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuIRjtZJGmQ&feature=player_embedded

Thoughts****
I feel sure wthin a few years when all the existing Genetic information is decoded and reviewed.....scientists will be able to tell which of us has a mixture of Neanderthal within us. And further more, what type of subtle genetic characteur, or mental differences there might be, attributable to this genetic mixture....if any?