{"id":301,"date":"2007-03-07T22:28:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T21:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=301"},"modified":"2007-03-07T22:28:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-07T21:28:00","slug":"neanderthal-genes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/neanderthal-genes\/","title":{"rendered":"Neanderthal genes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Neanderthal woman<\/a>
Originally uploaded by different_views<\/a>. <\/span><\/div>\n

In the latest issue of New Scientist, there is a long article (“The Neanderthal within”) about the feasibility of early humans having absorbed some Neanderthals into the population. While the evidence still looks somewhat flaky, I realise the possibility cannot be totally ruled out yet (but we’ll see when the Neanderthal genome is finally sequenced).<\/p>\n

However, one bit of the article troubled me: “Like it or not, we may have to accept that our species is, to some extent, a hybrid. There’s a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us.”<\/p>\n

This just doesn’t make sense! As far as I know it’s uncontroversial that Neanderthals never went south of the Mediterranean or east of the Urals. Likewise, homo erectus<\/i> was restricted to a much smaller area than homo sapiens<\/i>. But the logical conclusion of this is that while Neanderthals and other species of homo<\/i> could have had sex with us in Europe and other specific areas, surely humans in large parts of the world would not have had this opportunity, so our species as a whole clearly cannot be a hybrid, even if it could be shown to be true for Europeans.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neanderthal woman Originally uploaded by different_views. In the latest issue of New Scientist, there is a long article (“The Neanderthal within”) about the feasibility of early humans having absorbed some Neanderthals into the population. While the evidence still looks somewhat flaky, I realise the possibility cannot be totally ruled out yet (but we’ll see when the Neanderthal genome is finally sequenced). However, one bit of the article troubled me: “Like it or not, we may have to accept that our species is, to some extent, a hybrid. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}