iirc this has been known for a while. We had sex with them so much that they stopped existing as a separate species.
Garrison would be proud. We truly fucked them to death.
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.
Marjorie Taylor Greene?
I’ve got a bit of Neanderthal DNA, and a lot of folks of Eastern European descent do as well. My ancestors were swingers, I guess.
We call them MAGA now.
In an archaeology sub. Really. This is exactly why the US is so divided and why violence is your most likely outcome. Grow a personality and stop dragging politics into everything.
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 it’s 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.
Im roughly 2 percent
Post your browline
I can’t get th3 camera far enough away to capture it all
There’s a fantastic youtube channel by Stephan Milo that does nothing but explore the origins of “humans” (in the very broad sense).
