Neanderthals didn't truly go extinct, but were rather absorbed into the modern human population, DNA study suggests
Neanderthals didn't truly go extinct, but were rather absorbed into the modern human population, DNA study suggests
Modern human DNA may have made up a surprisingly large amount of the Neanderthal genome, a new study finds.
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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.
Coincidentally just just watched this Gutsick Gibbon (primatologist) vid which touches on this a bit (though not the main topic). https://youtu.be/dy7_LousWVo
Well, this newfound knowledge could have us decide that Neanderthals were not a different species, actually.