All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm

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.<p>The actual study found that Neanderthal DNA is present in a small percentage (not all) of people in each continent. Including Africa.<p>Anyone contemplating downvoting this, for the love of scientific reality please read the actual original paper first.

This is basically a confirmation of Reich's and Paabo's 2010 work sequencing the Neanderthal genome. Interesting and totally consistent with their findings.<p>Also, for those of you who read this article, the Nick Patterson quoted in the article was, in another lifetime, a cryptologist: <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE6D81431F931A25751C1A9609C8B63" rel="nofollow">http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE6D81431F...</a>

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

Brian Dunning did a Skeptoid episode about a related issue: 'Neanderthals in Present Day Asia'<p><a href="http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4040" rel="nofollow">http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4040</a><p>A snippet: <i>"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.<p>[...]<p>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."</i>

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.<p>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.<p>It's exciting times to be interested in human evolution.<p>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).<p>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!

Are Neanderthals extinct? Not totally. Neither are dinosaurs 1.<p>[1]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird</a>

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.

Soooo... Africans are the only pure blood homo sapiens? Interesting.<p>I have a feeling a lot of supremacists groups are going to start making a point of how superior Neanderthals were soon enough.

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?

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

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

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'.

a w e s o m e

Yeah, but only from their women.