[HN Gopher] Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals be...
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Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their
extinction
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-09-22 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cell.com)
| fsckboy wrote:
| the article mentions a rare distomolar: (dentistry) A congenital
| supernumerary (extra) tooth located posterior to the third molar
| tooth
|
| an extra/supernumerary tooth in another part of the mouth would
| be called, front to back, a mesiodens or a paramolar
|
| supernumerary teeth may be:
|
| Supplemental (where the tooth has a normal shape for the teeth in
| that series);
|
| Tuberculate (also called barrel shaped);
|
| Conical (also called peg shaped);
|
| Compound odontoma (multiple small tooth-like forms);
|
| Complex odontoma (a disorganized mass of dental tissue)
|
| (most of that info is from wikipedia, but it did not have the
| definition of distomolar, had to chase that down in wiktionary)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperdontia which cites Oxford
| Handbook of Clinical Dentistry.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Wow this paper was fascinating.
|
| Multiple Neanderthal groups in Europe geographically fairly
| close, on the brink of extinction, yet no interbreeding for
| 50,000 years.
|
| The stories that pop into my mind!
| mkoubaa wrote:
| My first thought was very disturbing, that they were bred by
| humans as pets.
| danielbln wrote:
| Or slaves.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| You don't really need slaves in a hunter and gatherer
| society (no agriculture, no construction, no mining = no
| backbreaking work that free people are loath to do), and
| you don't really have the institutions to keep them from
| running away.
|
| As far as our observations of Stone Age people go, if they
| catch someone, they either kill them or make them a
| permanent member of the group.
| brink wrote:
| Masters have bred with slaves since the beginning of
| history. Abraham and Hagar, for example.
| datameta wrote:
| We would see the heavy intermixture in one of the groups in
| that case. In addition, if one group was in homo sapiens
| captivity, then it is overwhelmingly likely that the other
| group would be found during those 50 thousand years
| (considering our propensity for migration).
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Neapets
| rightbyte wrote:
| "Fairly close", as in, "somewhere else in France, which in the
| year of 45000 BC, is mainly forest"?
|
| If I read the map correctly.
| usrnm wrote:
| Our ancestors and Neanderthal ancestors for that matter came
| there all the way from Africa. It was definitely doable at
| the time
| kuhewa wrote:
| Yes several weeks. But no contact is a little surprising for
| fifty generations, let alone fifty thousand years.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Hmm .. ye thinking about it, it is kinda strange. Dunno how
| long you need to roam around until you see some other tribe
| by chance. But certainly not thousands of years?
| fsckboy wrote:
| it doesn't say that. too few individual remains in too few
| locations have been found to understand whether the groups had
| been living near each other for 50,000 years or what their
| social structures were at all. It would make sense for a
| species near extinction to have small population clusters
| migrating and not bumping into each other. They do contrast
| this with what is known of early modern human genomes in the
| same areas which do appear to be more mixed, but why wouldn't
| examples of a newly successful expanding population appear
| different from remnants of an old population dying out?
|
| so what they found is not at odds with what you are suggesting,
| but there are other explanations, and not much data
| kuhewa wrote:
| > It would make sense for a species near extinction to have
| small population clusters migrating and not bumping into each
| other
|
| What evidence do you suggest supports this for 50k years?
|
| The group Thorin was from may have been close to extinction
| when he died, but when genetic isolation started they were
| 50k years away from being that close to extinction. It seems
| remarkable based on what we know of hunter gathers or even
| animal population structure and movement, that there would be
| no mixing for that long.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Probably enslaved by humans and kept from interbreeding.
| Alternatively, very strong tribal culture that prevented
| intermixing like in the tribes in Papua New Guinea.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't think slavery made sense for nomadic people. Also,
| 'slave' is a quite advanced abstract concept for a time when
| humans could barely speak with eachother.
| biorach wrote:
| > a time when humans could barely speak with eachother.
|
| That's a pretty wild claim
| rafram wrote:
| We don't know anything about Neanderthal language, or
| even whether they had something we would consider
| language.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| We're talking about the Homo sapiens here since they
| would be doing the enslaving.
| PlattypusRex wrote:
| I'm confused by this, humans already had well-developed and
| complex language well before we started moving out of
| Africa into Europe.
| underlipton wrote:
| Relatively high divergence of language across a
| relatively small geographic area? How often, exactly, are
| you interacting with people outside your family group?
| Outside your local group of family groups? Even factoring
| in nomadism.
| euroderf wrote:
| > The stories that pop into my mind!
|
| Clan of the Cave Bear ?
| escapecharacter wrote:
| one day we'll find the first incel cave painting. What wonders
| the ancient world holds!
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Grog kill mammoth with bare hand, but girls like tool-making
| Chad. Not fair!
| fsckboy wrote:
| tangential: the modern human genome shows remnants of Neanderthal
| genes indicating that there was some mixing. Do any of these
| Neanderthal genomes show any similar mixing in the other
| direction?
| lapcat wrote:
| According to the book "The Naked Neanderthal" by the paper's
| lead author, no.
|
| This suggests that humans socially dominated Neanderthals when
| they came into contact.
|
| The evidence does show that humans were vastly superior at
| making weapons.
| masklinn wrote:
| That book is definitely incorrect given we know the
| neanderthal "y" chromosome disappeared some 60 thousand years
| before neanderthals did, replaced by H. sapiens sapiens's.
|
| H. sapiens mtDNA was also found in "recent" neanderthal
| remains.
| biorach wrote:
| Source?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/neandertals-and-
| mode...
| biorach wrote:
| That doesn't really cover it
| lapcat wrote:
| > That book is definitely incorrect
|
| That's a rather bold claim about one of the world's
| foremost paleoanthropologists.
|
| "When you are searching for ancient DNA [from 40,000 to
| 45,000 years ago] ... all these early sapiens have recent
| Neanderthal DNA, and that's why we have [Neanderthal DNA]
| today. But when you reach and you try to extract DNA from
| the last Neanderthals, contemporaries of these early
| sapiens -- let's say between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago --
| there's not a single Neanderthal with sapiens DNA."
| https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/simply-did-not-
| work-...
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > This suggests that humans socially dominated Neanderthals
| when they came into contact.
|
| Why? Is it because it is assumed that the dominant specie
| would steal the women (who would spread these traces in the
| dominant specie)?
|
| Isn't it possible that the dominant specie would also just
| rape, but not steal the women? (which would presumably cause
| the opposite genetic "flow")
| Keysh wrote:
| Harris et al. 2023, "Diverse African genomes reveal selection
| on ancient modern human introgressions in Neanderthals" https
| ://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09609...
|
| "... most Neanderthal homologous regions in sub-Saharan
| African populations originate from migration of AMH
| [anatomically modern human] populations from Africa to
| Eurasia ~250 kya, and subsequent admixture with Neanderthals,
| resulting in ~6% AMH ancestry in Neanderthals. These results
| indicate that there have been multiple migration events of
| AMHs out of Africa and that Neanderthal and AMH gene flow has
| been bi-directional."
|
| This is, admittedly, research published after Slimak's book
| came out, and referring to an earlier time period.
| lapcat wrote:
| Yes, I think his research focuses on a more recent period,
| and one of the main points of the book is to refute
| theories about why Neanderthals became extinct, so the
| 250kya period wouldn't be directly relevant to that.
|
| It's interesting that according to
| https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/humans-and-
| neanderth... "This group of humans died out".
| make3 wrote:
| I wonder if we will Jurassic Park a neanderthal one day, that
| would be interesting (meaning, make a living neanderthal probably
| by putting the genome in a human cell & getting it to develop
| into a fetus likely in a human womb, etc). I'm happy I'm not that
| neanderthal person.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| The big secret: Different human populations are actually just
| different hybrid compositions of ancient hominids. All have "Homo
| sapien" as a common mixin, but the other populations mixed in
| were way more diverse.
| dmead wrote:
| There is absolutely no evidence of this. Sounds like something
| to focus on if you really want to find a rational basis for
| racism.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| There is a ton of evidence of it. Some humans are up to
| 20-30% neanderthal. Professors just arent screaming it from
| the rooftops. See the most recent dwarkesh podcast
| simonh wrote:
| I think you've got your facts garbled, or the podcast has.
| Up to about 20% of Neanderthal DNA has survived somewhere
| dispersed among humans, but some countries and backgrounds
| have a maximum of 3% per human. The average is about 2%
| outside Africa.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| watch the podcast again, he explicitly calls out:
|
| "but some countries and backgrounds have a maximum of 3%
| per human. The average is about 2% outside Africa."
|
| as mostly false
| astine wrote:
| I would like to see his sources because that contradicts
| the most well known studies. There are still a lot of
| paleoanthropologists who don't think that interbreeding
| was possible at all and the apparent Neanderthal
| admixture in modern humans is due to contamination.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10
| 406...
| Tor3 wrote:
| If there's a ton of evidence for this, please provide some
| citations. I for one have never heard a single scientific
| claim for individual people having 20-30% Neanderthal DNA.
| As the sibling comment said, there may be that much
| Neanderthal DNA spread around in total, but no single
| individual sapiens has more than a tenth of that.
| niemandhier wrote:
| This is technically correct but unfortunately presented in a
| confusing manner.
|
| Different modern human populations have indeed different trace
| amounts of genetics of other lines of humans, but it's ,,homo
| sapiens sapiens plus 1-4% homo sapient x" for all of them.
|
| The Wiki page is a good source of references:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| its way more than 1-4%
| newsuser wrote:
| Thread about the same research
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512191
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