
All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm - funthree
http://news.discovery.com/human/genetics-neanderthal-110718.html
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bugsy
That is not what "genetics confirm". I wish people at yellow journalism
pseudoscience rag "Discover" would read the darn paper before spouting off on
it.

The actual study found that Neanderthal DNA is present in a small percentage
(not all) of people in each continent. Including Africa.

Anyone contemplating downvoting this, for the love of scientific reality
please read the actual original paper first.

~~~
carbocation
The headline is only slightly off. Even the title of the actual journal
article ( <http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/7/1957.abstract> ) is "An
X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African
Populations"

Anyway, the fact that Neanderthal sequence is present in all non-African
populations is more important and interesting than whether or not Neanderthal
sequence is present in all non-African human individuals. By statistical
likelihood, we'd expect the answer to the latter question to be 'no', while
the answer to the former is interesting, empiric, and, now, known to be 'yes'.

~~~
bugsy
The headline is not slightly off, it is completely inaccurate because the hack
"journalist" at Discover didn't read the paper. It is not true at all that
"All Non-Africans Part Neandertal". On average world wide, they found a
Neandertal chromosome segment present in 9% of the 6092 chromosome samples
from all inhabited continents.

It's also not true what both titles suggest that no African samples were part
neandertal, the supposed neandertal segment (B006) was found in several
African samples from their extremely limited sample size that doesn't even
cover a small fraction of ethnic populations of Africa. Not only is it present
in several African samples they tested, it is likely to be found in others as
well should this be extended to a more comprehensive sample of world ethnic
groups.

As a completely separate topic, the uniquely Neandertal origin of B006 is
speculative to say the very least, but it's fine to assume so for the sake of
argument, it's just not a definitive claim of fact... yet.

~~~
losvedir
Oh my, if what you're saying is correct, then thank you. I saw this story on
Ars, Discover, and a couple places and took the wrong thing from it (both
individual vs. population, and the presence of neandertal genes in some
africans).

To be clear, are you saying the more accurate statement would be: "Neandertal
chromosome segments found in all tested non-african populations, and some
tested african populations"? (Which, when you put it that way, seems like a
somewhat weird distinction to make.)

edit: I followed the link upthread, but it was only to the paper abstract. Is
the full paper available for free online somewhere?

edit2: It seems the distinction might be no neandertal geneds found in sub-
Saharan African population samples?

~~~
bugsy
> "Neandertal chromosome segments found in all tested non-african populations,
> and some tested african populations"?

Yes, your more accurate statement is correct.

> "It seems the distinction might be no neandertal genes found in sub-Saharan
> African population samples?"

Regarding the Sub-Saharan distinction, the article text's terminology
describes haplotype B006 as "virtually" absent from Subsaharan Africa. They
then explain this as meaning that 6 out of the 1420 subsaharan samples
contained B006, including 5 from tribal groups in Burkina Faso. They explain
this away by supposing that these tribal groups must have historically
interbred with north African groups, which is not an unreasonable guess, but I
am sure it is also true for many other subsaharan groups as well. North
African incidence rates of B006 are comparable to the middle east and Russia
and higher than China.

So, 0.4% of sub-saharan samples contained B006, but not none. Also, north-
western mexico, east south america, east china, siberia and indonesia all have
similarly extremely low incidence rates, but no explicit mention of these
areas is made in the paper, it's just seen in the data. Only subsaharan africa
is called out for special mention. The highest rates of B006 are in western
Canada - greater than 25% in some areas.

There is also a separate problem of the circular argument due to the inherent
selection bias of brute force digging through the data sets looking for a gene
with these characteristics. It's not like they started with a gene they knew
was neandertal only, researchers sought out a gene in the single sequenced
neandertal sample which had lower modern african incidence rates and from that
concluded it was a non-african sourced neandertal gene, then turned around and
concluded the reverse, bringing the argument full circle. That's another
problem but I'd just as soon not get into that since I would much rather
assume that is all good and only focus on the very misleading titles that are
going around in articles about this paper.

~~~
yot
Thanks for this explanation. It seems you know more than any of those
journalists. Let me please ask you a question that has intrigued me for a
while that is not directly related to this.

There have been studies showing that individuals from two different races, for
example Caucasian and West African, are usually more similar genetically to
some members of the other race than to some of his own. What is meant by this?
How is it possible considering that people of the same race share much more
recent ancestry than people of different races? Then later you see graphs
showing genetic clusters, how can there be clusters if people aren't more
similar to one another for being of the same race? Did they use mixed race
individuals for these studies? Are the parts of the genome that make two
people look more similar to each other random parts or specific ones, what do
these parts do? And finally in the global similarity section of 23andme, one
can see the groups he's most related to, how is this possible?

~~~
bugsy
I just try to read the papers with these articles.

I'm not up to date with the racial arguments you mention. I know there was
something of an obsession 50-100 years ago with trying to establish a
scientific basis to justify racism, imperialism, land theft, sterilization,
imprisonment and subjugation of non-european peoples and there are still
vestiges of those assumptions in a lot of research.

With the claim that "individuals from two different races, for example
Caucasian and West African, are usually more similar genetically to some
members of the other race than to some of his own", I have heard similar
claims but how I understand it is they are not saying randomly chosen
individuals from two different groups are more similar than randomly chosen
individuals from within a group, but are comparing diversity of individuals
within a group to diversity of _group averages_ between groups. In other
words, the claim is that the variation between two related individuals is
greater than the variation between two unrelated groups, taken as averages.
You are correct that if the claim is being presented that individuals between
unrelated groups are more related than individuals within related groups, the
argument doesn't make sense. It would not be surprising though if it has been
presented that way in some articles and then repeated until it became a self-
propagating myth. And again to clarify, I'm not up to date with any of those
arguments, but just speculating on what might be going on.

~~~
yot
Thank you. I don't understand how the diversity between averages can be
smaller and what I had understood not be true.

<http://i.imgur.com/1k6Ct.jpg>

I'm not arguing any position, just trying to understand without being very
familiar with genetics or statistics. Maybe I've read the studies the way you
presented it but my simple mind interpreted it that way. I'm guessing there is
a huge flaw in what I drew but I don't see it, I can't picture in my mind what
you meant.

~~~
bugsy
In your drawing, I think it should be where the blue and green scatters are
completely overlapping, that would be more like the actual data. They would be
completely separate scatter plots if it was comparing something like humans to
algae or such. Even humans and elephants have a lot of overlap in their DNA,
you'd have to get pretty different to have no overlap.

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carbocation
This is basically a confirmation of Reich's and Paabo's 2010 work sequencing
the Neanderthal genome. Interesting and totally consistent with their
findings.

Also, for those of you who read this article, the Nick Patterson quoted in the
article was, in another lifetime, a cryptologist:
[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE6D81431F...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE6D81431F931A25751C1A9609C8B63)

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w1ntermute
Hopefully this is not exploited to "scientifically" explain the inferiority of
sub-Saharan Africans vis-a-vis the rest of humanity.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the way that newspapers report on
scientific research is that journalists' lack of knowledge of the subject
matter leads to lots of vague statements that can be easily twisted around to
have just about any desired meaning.

~~~
Dove
The equality of humanity is not an empirical judgement. It is a value
judgement. It rests, not on scientific grounds, but on ideological grounds.

~~~
reinhardt
This is an empirical judgement: <http://kuvaton.com/kuvei/evolution5.jpg>

~~~
okal
Feel free to google Great Zimbabwe, Old Ghana, Mwene Mutapa or Timbuktu. I
could give you a tonne of other examples but your ignorance, I fear, is
incurable. All the same, Rome != Europe, and Africa is not a fucking city. And
how - what I presume to be a - German, interprets the feats of a culture whose
development is only remotely connected to his own, is something beyond my
African capacity to comprehend.

~~~
yot
His argument is completely flawed. All areas surrounding the Mediterranean
benefited greatly from being able to cover large distances by boat. This
allowed trade to flourish and civilizations to prosper in this part. The
fertile crescent was the hub of all this, you can trace the origin of European
civilization to this point. You could simplify it and say that it went like
this: Egypt, Greece, Rome and Europe. Meanwhile, there was a huge dessert
isolating Sub-Saharan Africa. You have to keep in mind though that Timbuktu
for example didn't spring out of nothing but thanks to Muslims from the North.

Other places were able to get their own civilization thanks to one reason or
the other, e.g. Eastern China.

All that has to do with achievements of different societies. Now at the
individual level, how do we know whether groups with Caucasian genes would
have been able to develop a civilization if they had lived in a place with the
same geography and conditions as Sub-Saharan Africans? We can't know.

What we know though is that the conditions are there now for individuals with
predominantly Sub-Saharan ancestry to show what they are capable of.
Eventually they'll produce someone like Mozart, Newton, Confucius, Sun Tzu,
Jabir ibn Hayyan or Abbas ibn Firnas. Or maybe they won't. Perhaps too early
to tell.

~~~
okal
One of the points I was trying to make was, "Africa" as an entity does not
exist, save for in Western and post-colonial Pan African texts. We do not see
ourselves as African, identifying primarily as one of hundreds, maybe
thousands, of distinct ethnolinguistic groups - tribes, if you will. I am a
Luo. I only see myself as a Kenyan when I'm outside the country. African
cultures - specifically Black African cultures - tend to have strong oral
traditions that do not lend themselves well to transcription using Western
templates for historical writing. In my tribe, there's a legend of a man known
as Lwanda Magere, who conquered nations surrounding the Luo. This would be our
equivalent of Alexander the Great. My guess is you've never heard of this, or
the million other similar stories from Black Africa. The Mozart's of your
world exist because you developed writing or borrowed it from close by
civilizations. It's all about records.

>You have to keep in mind though that Timbuktu for example didn't spring out
of nothing but thanks to Muslims from the North.

This would be like calling Sicilly an Arabic city. Timbuktu grew as a center
of trade within Black Africa as a result of trade with the northern Arabic and
Arabized Berber states. This does not make it any less valid as an example.

PS: May not look like it, but I largely agree with you.

~~~
donteflon
Sicilly is not a city, is an island with a lot of cities. Before the Arabs
even existed, Greek colonists founded Syracuse (which is around 2700 years
old) the birth place of Archimedes.

------
Luyt
Brian Dunning did a Skeptoid episode about a related issue: 'Neanderthals in
Present Day Asia'

<http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4040>

A snippet: _"Really quick history lesson on Neanderthals. They are not an
ancestor of modern humans. Homo neanderthalensis is descended from a separate
branch that split off from the evolutionary tree about 516,000 years ago,
according to some research published in Nature. Mitochondrial DNA studies have
shown conclusively that Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens evolved
separately. As the Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens moved in across Europe about 45,000
years ago, Homo neanderthalensis was pushed out into little corners of the
world. The last known population died out in the vicinity of Gibraltar about
24,000 years ago, thus ending their approximately 300,000 year existence.

[...]

So now we've got a fair handle on the landscape of evidence in front of us,
and now we can take a skeptical look at what we've got. Basically, nothing. We
have some vaguely plausible hypotheses — yeah, I suppose it's possible that
relic Neanderthals and Gigantopithecus or even some descendant of Paranthropus
could survive in remote parts of Asia — but that's all we really have, a
hypothesis. A hypothesis is a provisional explanation for these stories of
wildmen in captivity and bearing children."_

------
com
Apart from discussions on the quality of headline writers in popular and
specialist scientific journals, I find it really interesting that the "out of
Africa" hypothesis seems to need to merge with the multicentric model of human
evolution.

Add to that the Denisova hominin sequencing (from the single toe bone that was
thought to be Neandertal of a population that may have diverged from the
African populations around 900kYA) and possible presence of up to a 4%
admixture in Papuan and Melanesian populations.

It's exciting times to be interested in human evolution.

Remember that a 4% contribution is about what you might expect from a great-
great grandparent (although we're talking whole populations here, not specific
individuals).

My take home: the different clades of humans/hominins have been able to
recognise enough of themselves in others that they were able to mix and
interbreed. Early human prehistory wasn't just genocides and extinctions due
to overspecialisation and ecological change. Awesome!

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meric
Are Neanderthals extinct? Not totally. Neither are dinosaurs 1.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird>

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andrewflnr
With this and other discoveries regarding Neanderthals in mind, does it still
make sense to call them non-human in any meaningful sense? I would think the
fact that we all interbred would be enough to knock down the species barrier,
but I don't know for sure.

~~~
william42
I've usually seen Neanderthals described as Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis,
meaning that they are considered the same species.

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Aloisius
Soooo... Africans are the only pure blood homo sapiens? Interesting.

I have a feeling a lot of supremacists groups are going to start making a
point of how superior Neanderthals were soon enough.

~~~
bpd1069
Yes, and I imagine a large number of individuals, white supremacists or not,
are going to do some mental gymnastics to reconcile this finding.

~~~
kstenerud
What mental gymnastics? We don't know what this DNA does, nor why it was
useful in an evolutionary sense to keep it.

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maxklein
Okay, then explain this: There is no fossil evidence of neanderthals in east
asia or australia. There is a lot of fossil evidence of neanderthals in
europe. If humans mated with neanderthals, then why is there no stronger
presence of neanderthal DNA is europeans (compared to asians) in either this
study or the previous one?

~~~
carbocation
Nobody is suggesting that Neanderthals were in East Asia or Australia. The
theory is that during the exodus from Africa, genetic exchange occurred.

~~~
maxklein
Yes, but don't you get it? AFTER the exodus from Africa, the two populations
were living in the same region (europe), but did not inter-mix at all anymore.
Otherwise there would be more DNA in the europeans.

Why mix when in the middle east and then refuse to mix when in Europe?

~~~
carbocation
I do not think that human history occurred the way you think it occurred.

~~~
maxklein
How did it happen then? It appears you have no idea

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ekm
Even Neanderthal's have African roots,so i do not see why anyone is struggling
to make distinctions

~~~
carbocation
> Even Neanderthal's have African roots,so i do not see why anyone is
> struggling to make distinctions

All life originated with a single common ancestor, but I still find
distinctions to be useful. Neanderthals and humans were considered to be
different species, so this is a fairly weighty finding. Anyway, making
distinctions is perhaps the essence of being human.

~~~
killerswan
I suspect that Neanderthals were smart enough and talented enough that we'd
call them human and give them civil rights, today, if any were around. They
mind be kinda odd, and incredible football players, but who knows.

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twidlit
very interesting. I wonder if there are behavioral difference between Non-
africans and Africans that can be attributed to the difference in genetic
makeup.

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Devilboy
I heard rumors about this around 2005 but at the time nobody in the field
wanted to say anything publicly for fear of being labeled 'racists'.

~~~
carbocation
Small-scale sequencing studies in Neanderthal samples were occurring back in
2006, and were being published openly and discussed in the New York Times.

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bauchidgw
a w e s o m e

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beefman
Yeah, but only from their women.

