White People Are Neanderthals

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Apparently this isn’t really news, but I’m just now hearing about it — Neanderthal Man died out about 30,000 years ago, but he left some of his DNA behind, especially in people scientists are delicately calling “non-African.” Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia, but apparently didn’t get to Africa much. Early humans in Europe and Asia hooked up with the Neanderthals, so to speak, and although these were two different species, they were close enough genetically to have offspring, and some of those offspring (unlike, say, mules) were fertile. So Whites and Asians today have inherited 1 to 3 percent of our genomes from Neanderthals.

According to a news bit at NBC, the Neanderthal DNA is particularly associated with skin and hair — red hair especially.

I am amused.

22 thoughts on “White People Are Neanderthals”

  3. The red hair makes me think of Erik Erickson, who on many occasions has acted like a neanderthal.

    • paradoctor — they were on the edge of being almost the same species, but not quite. I’m not sure how they know this, but the researchers have decided most of the offspring would have been sterile, but obviously there were exceptions.

  8. “I’m not sure how they know this, but the researchers have decided most of the offspring would have been sterile, but obviously there were exceptions.”

    Yeah, the exceptions are now called ‘conservatives’.

  9. It’s not only white people who are 1 tp 3 percent Neanderthal; Asians and Native Americans are too. So ‘non-African’ is not just a euphemism, it’s technically accurate. Also, African-Americans also have some Neanderthal genes, due to (euphemism) ‘involuntary interbreeding’ during slavery.

    Also, there’s Denisovian genes in Melanesians.

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  10. I’ve encountered a few people in my life time who have had way more than a measly 3% of the Neanderthal genome. Some of them were probably within the 75% range. They not only could walk upright, they could walk upright while carrying a bible.

  11. We should note that Neanderthals had larger brains than Cro-magnon, although that wouldn’t necessarily indicate that they were as intelligent, they did have burial rituals and may have had a more complex society than we have given them credit for.

    One theory I have heard is that their hunting methods were different from Cro-magnon’s, like their bodies, more adapted to cold climates. It might have been a change in climate that led to the failure of their hunting practices. But, as we face the consequences of climate change in our own time, it’s pretty natural to project the situation backward.

    Temple Grandin wrote that there was no evidence that Neanderthals kept dogs, where Cro-magnon did. That would seem like a huge survival advantage to me.

    Well, whatever, it’s hard not to have a soft spot for the old fellows. These days, I feel a bit like a Neanderthal myself, and then sometimes, I wish I could “channel my inner Neanderthal a bit more.” — (I don’t mean in THAT way you smart Alecs!)

    Darn it, I have that “Wringle, Wrangle” song stuck in my head again. Extinction doesn’t seem like a bad alternative.

  12. Swami, what was that old Rodney Dangerfield joke? “In his family, he was only the second generation of not walking on all four.”

  14. Just how do you determine that offspring of matings between Neanderthals and other homo sapiens were infertile? As a mere PH.D biochemist I’d like to know.
    And I definitely agree with paradoctor, if they were intra-fertile they were not technically of different species.
    Just trying to achieve accuracy. Thanks.

    • Just how do you determine that offspring of matings between Neanderthals and other homo sapiens were infertile? As a mere PH.D biochemist I’d like to know.

      See article in Nature magazine:

      Sex with Neanderthals had its ups and its downs. Cross-breeding may have given modern humans genes useful for coping with climates colder than Africa’s, but the hybrid offspring probably suffered from significant fertility problems. …

      … “These were bits of the genomes that had not seen each other for half a million years,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the Nature study along with colleague Sriram Sankararaman. “That’s something that doesn’t happen in human populations today.” …

      … Reich’s team, meanwhile, discovered that today’s humans tend to have few of the Neanderthal genes that are activated in the testes or located on the X chromosome. In organisms such as fruitflies, such patterns are hallmarks of hybrid sterility, indicating that two populations are too distantly related to breed successfully. Modern humans and Neanderthals “were at the edge of biological compatibility”, Reich concludes, and their hybrids probably suffered high rates of infertility.

      That is all I know.

  16. What is a species? I read a description (Stephen Jay Gould, I think) of a population of birds living on the rims of both sides of a slot canyon in California. As one went up one rim to the top of the slot, and then down the other, all adjacent sub-populations were intrafertile. However, the birds from opposing rims at the opening of the slot were mutually infertile. Where did one species change into another?

  17. That pluky is interesting. I’ll have to delve into the details. I guess some of my 50 year old biology (even from MIT) is getting out of date.

  18. The last chapter of Chris Stringer’s (“Out of Africa”) book, Lone Survivors – How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth, discusses this in some detail. He takes a more conservative approach to human interbreeding – and doesn’t pretend he knows all the answers. By the time Homo Sapiens appeared in large numbers, the Neanderthal population and the climate were both changing fast. We have to assume, though, that the Neanderthals – successful for hundreds of thousands of years, by the way – were being edged out.

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