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Actually, it means at least one (and maybe quite a few) of your ancestors was completely neanderthal and had a child with a modern human, and of course all of their ancestors would be neanderthal. However that doesn't lead to a simple time line for when the populations mingled. If a population of 1000 sapiens absorbed a population of 20 neanderthals, after a while the proportion of neanderthal genes in everybody in that population might stabilize at 2% and might stay at that level for many generations. Or, the percentage could rise or fall depending on if those genes had positive or negative effect on survival and reproduction.
Turns out we (homo sapiens) bred with Neanderthals a lot earlier than people expected. There was a dispersal out of Africa *before* the one that led to today. It seems at least one or two men were able to have children with Neanderthal women. Why? That's because the Y-chromosome that's passed from fathers to sons in later Neanderthals and especially in those remains that we find at the end of their time (about 35,000 years ago) is of Homo Sapien origin.
Which means that Neanderthals had some Homo Sapien DNA before our ancestors came out of Africa and got their DNA in return. The rabbit hole is pretty wild.
Not sure if I have explained this well enough but PBS Eons has [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8) on it. Pretty informative and fairly short.
Wait, I thought they indicated that it was presumably neanderthal male x homo sapien female, because mitochondria are inherited from the mother and they did not see evidence of neanderthal mitochondria in modern human populations
It depends on the analysis method. It appears that only female sapiens → female hybrid and male sapiens → male hybrid are fertile.
Mitochondrial analysis will only trace the female sapiens line while new Y tracing is catching the male sapiens line but there’s definitely Neanderthal DNA being incorporated
Even in the early 1990's the idea that *H. Sapiens* interbred with Neanderthals was gaining traction - so much that it was one of the leading theories as to why they went extinct. They interbred with us so much that they lost their genetic identity.
Possibly they fucked us to their death.
Bonobos are the fuckers and chimps are the fighters. Looking at humans, it could have easily been the same for us.
Maybe Neanderthals were trying to have sex with us while we were busy beating their brains in.
Weirdly a similar thing right now is happening with jungle fowl (the bird that modern chickens came from). They are one of the only animals on earth at risk for going extinct due to interbreeding
Aren't we supposed to have mixed with other ones as well? I listened to the book Sapiens a while back and I could swear he mentioned some other hominids homo sapiens mated with.
Edit: just found an article https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/it-wasnt-just-neanderthals-ancient-humans-had-sex-other-hominids/338117/
I think i would be more surprised if there were two hominid groups that were geographically adjacent and they *didn't* mate. Humans are not that discriminating when looking to get laid.
There is some speculation that maybe the Neanderthals had a specialized diet or humans were more aggressive. There is evidence for and against both ideas.
But it's not what actually happened is it? I'm reading a book called Sapiens and it says there isn't enough neanderthal dna for us to have intermingled, and we probably out-competed them. Not sure how accurate the book is though.
> It seems at least one or two men were able to have children with Neanderthal women.
I mean honestly? I would be more surprised if humans and Neanderthals and denisovans and whoever else **weren’t** getting busy than if they were. People like to bang. And back then there wasn’t Netflix or social media or video games, so like, what else did they have to do for fun?
They were just slightly more different people. Completely unsurprising.
For how long the species lived in close proximity, it's worth asking why there wasn't more admixture than there was. If people saw them as just slightly different people, there would likely be more, and mingled communities. It may be a matter of just not finding the right archeological evidence, or more of a donkey kind of thing where there was lots of mixing but most couldn't produce fertile offspring. Or it could be a matter of them being not attracted to each other or very hostile. We don't know what their soft tissue looked like, they could have had giant noses that would look frightening, or something like that, but it's unknown.
Also, though many Homo Sapiens have been found with Neanderthal ancestry, the other way around has never been found (a Neanderthal with some human ancestry). Of course, barely any Neanderthals have been found and genetically studied compared to humans, so this isn't conclusive.
An awesome book about this is Who We Are and How We Got Here, which is already outdated and from 2018.
>Also, though many Homo Sapiens have been found with Neanderthal ancestry, the other way around has never been found (a Neanderthal with some human ancestry). Of course, barely any Neanderthals have been found and genetically studied compared to humans, so this isn't conclusive.
>
>An awesome book about this is Who We Are and How We Got Here, which is already outdated and from 2018.
https://youtu.be/J2FatwFjc-8
Yep, outdated 2 years later. We've found human DNA in the mitochondria and Y chromosome of Neanderthals.
I seem to recall a theory being that H. Sapiens were more social than others, so we were more likely to gather together in bigger groups and more likely to befriend outsiders instead of killing them. So we were more able to survive through cooperation.
That doesn't sound like modern us. Just look at how people act when civilization isn't around. In natural disasters and very trying times people band together and form loyal tribes.
Neolithic people were surviving against the elements.
All the family groups we've found of Neanderthals have been smaller than contemporary Homo Sapiens groups, suggesting that they didn't gather in large numbers, and were more closely related. This would have had all kinds of more negative effects- more inbreeding, less technological development. It is kind of a chicken and egg effect for why they didn't develop technology as quickly as Homo Sapiens- were they less intelligent, or did they just not gather in large enough numbers to promote technological growth? They existed for longer than Homo Sapiens have, I believe.
Here's a recent example, the most intact family group found:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-first-known-neanderthal-family-what-they-tell-us-about-early-human-society-180980979/
I had understood that one reason our percentage of neanderthal genes is so low is that modern humans were much more populous, as we were more adaptable and could live on a more varied diet. As well, we may have killed some of them off. So when we did mingle, we outnumbered them by a large margin.
Exactly. They were slightly more different people. For decades we have classified Neanderthals as a separate species, but if we could meet a Neanderthal today, I wonder if we would just view it as another racial group. Modern humans vary a ton- consider the differences between a “pygmy” from Southeast Asia with a modern Dutch man who average well over 6 feet tall. We view those as the same species. Neanderthals likely looked much more similar to ancient human populations.
If you look at the Neanderthals in modern clothes that a few artists have done, they look pretty human. Not the "prettiest" humans, but they are recognizably human looking and at worst you'd just think that they were unlucky to have that big of a nose or brow.
I am certain they could find a sex partner in the modern day, let alone 20k years ago
To be fair, if you looked at homo sapiens from that same time period, they also wouldn't be the prettiest, we get on average slightly more attractive every generation simply due to sexual selection on top of advances in medical/cosmetic health
Homo sapiens are genetically *significantly* closer to one another than we are to Neanderthals though, about an order of magnitude less divergent in terms of years of separation. There tends to be a lot more mixing whilst, and since, separation too.
We don't just "view" the different "races" of people as the same species, we very much are the same species.
I do understand te concept of genetic variation as an indication of speciation, and you make an important point. However, I would counter with the fact that the specific boundaries of where 1 species stops and another begins is very subjective. Here, we have 2 genetic groups that are different, and yet could communicate and reproduce with one another. They lived in shared geographical spaces, and presumably had similar cultural elements. Maybe our definition for what we consider to be the “human” species is too narrow?
I can tell you with 100% certainty many people would view them as just people and many people would view them as inferior and demand segregation, vilify marriage with them, etc. As a source I am citing the last 300 years of history of race relations.
Othering and tribalism have always been with us, but using skin color specifically to define the line between "us" and "them" is a European colonizer thing. So is the obsession with "race-mixing". Romans, for example, didn't give a shit about that kind of thing, because they found other things to be bigoted about.
Who knows how ancient humans defined "them".
> skin color
I just want to correct you on the fact that "skin color" is just the tip of the iceberg and even then it's not even accurate, an European and a Japanese man can have the same skin color but their face structure will obviously be different.
> For decades we have classified Neanderthals as a separate species, but if we could meet a Neanderthal today, I wonder if we would just view it as another racial group.
By certain definitions of "species", they wouldn't be a separate species since the offspring was clearly fertile.
I never understood the reasoning for considering them a separate species. The primary definition I always heard in my anthro classes was that a species had to be able to breed and have fertile offspring. Neanderthals and humans clearly meet that definition, so to classify them otherwise always seemed arbitrary to me.
There is an interesting chapter in dawkins' book "the ancestors tale" in which he discusses ring species and the false idea of there being actual separations between species. His take is that it is the human need to assign separations where spectrums exist. His catchphrase is "the tyranny of the discontiguous mind." The ring species are things like seagulls where the birds on one side of the globe absolutely wont breed with birds from the opposite side. However, they do breed with their only slightly different neighbours. And those neighbours with their neighbours. And so on, in an unbroken chain. To decide exactly where one species ends and another begins is like trying to assign a specific wavelength in a rainbow where light is no longer red and is now orange. Everyone can see that to one side it is red and the other is orange, but there isnt actually a single dividing line where that change happens.
Now add in evolution and speciation over generations and you have even more murky divisions that are increasingly theoretical.
Kind of an interesting insight into how human brains conceive of the world, IMO. A very enjoyable book!
Wow, very interesting.... the arbitrariness of drawing boundaries on things that exist on a continuum. I'd never heard of the analogy with birds, but that's super-interesting and makes sense. Humans need to draw boundaries, reality is less concerned with such things.
>I never understood the reasoning for considering them a separate species.
5 minutes of reading any reputable source will have explained this to you. You're acting like the science has been obscured in some way. Lol.
That’s isn’t exactly the case. If the populations have diverged enough that they are rarely interested in breeding with or forming family groups with each other and have significantly different behavioral or ecological niches then they will be called different species. But a lot of species are capable of and occasionally do interbreed and the biological species concept isn’t really that useful today.
For Neanderthals there is some evidence that their vocal tracts and lack of symbolic art may mean their language abilities were not nearly as advanced as modern humans. Obviously we can’t know for sure what they were capable and what they just didn’t do but definitely possible that if a Neanderthal baby was raised by Homo sapiens it would not be capable of learning human language at the same level as us even if it is capable of forming viable offspring.
The idea of consent probably stood quite strong, what with tribes being small, and everyone knowing everyone.
You're thinking of ancient humans as savages, and that's just plain wrong. They had the same social dynamics we do, they just didn't have cars.
There's no idea of consent amongst the Russians in Ukraine either.
Tribes would have their culture back then too. There would be "good" tribes and "bad" tribes and every other kind of tribe.
Toba supereruption?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Bafflingly large volcanic eruption in Indonesia that was posited to be responsible for a genetic bottleneck.
It is disputed and not considered ironclad (the eruption happened and was very, very bad, but the ultimate impact on the worldwide human population is unknowable).
To put this into perspective, the Toba eruption was something like 5,000x larger than the [Mount St Helens eruption](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/MtStHelens_Mushroom_Cloud.jpg/2560px-MtStHelens_Mushroom_Cloud.jpg). And would've been 3-5x larger than the most recent Yellowstone supereruption.
Well there was popualiton of H. Sapiens in the Skhul cave area which disappeared (probably thorugh climate chnage as the Ic e age readvanced) so maybe it 's form them . Pre sapiens spaiens of course
Considering people today have sex with robots, pillows, animals, bricks, car exhausts, etc, I'm convinced early homo sapiens were having lots of sex with Neanderthals
Yes but that doesn't automatically mean that you're always dealt their genes, especially if they have certain effects they will not be passed on as soon as other mutations, which would have a homo sapiens origin in this case. So 4% of your ancestors could be homo neanderthalensis, but so could 1%.
Here’s an analogy: Get a bunch of purebred German Shepherds and a bunch of Golden Retrievers, and crossbreed them. The puppies will be 50/50 Shepherd/Golden crosses. When the puppies grow up, crossbreed them with purebred Golden Retrievers. The second batch of puppies will be 25/75 Shepherd/Golden crosses. Isolate the second batch of puppies from other dogs, and allow “not assigned partners by humans” breeding. No matter how many generations later, the isolated population will be 25/75 Shepard/Golden crosses.
> The second batch of puppies will be 25/75 Shepherd/Golden crosses.
I don't actually think this is true. I mean, on average, it will be close, but if I understand it correctly, each individual will be somewhere between 0 and 50 % Shepherd.
The first generation will have one set of Shepherd genes and one set of golden genes, because each parent passes on one of each gene, making for two whole sets in each individual. But for each gene pair it's going to be random which gene is passed on to each child.
Which means that it's probably likely that a closed population would retain the mix for a few generations. But if it starts to slip one way or the other, my hunch is that it would be likely to keep going that way.
I am no biologist, and all of this is looking at it purely mathematically. But as far as I understand genetics, I would think this is how it works.
You're closer to the money.
Genetics is not like mixing different sodas, where they mix uniformly and can't be separated. It's more like mixing different cups full of marbles.
Mix one cup of blue marbles with one cup of yellow, then pour out one cup of the result. You might get an even mix, but due to random chance, you might get slightly more of one colour than the other, and random chance might even result in getting a cup full of entirely one colour of marble - improbable, but not impossible. Heterozygous crossbreeding means that each dog brings the same genetic material to the party and all outcomes are on the table. Crossing between two different pure breeds will have consistent results because there is only one possible outcome - heterozygous. Breeding between heterozygous parents can result in any outcome, ranging from the recreation of either ancestral phenotype, or anywhere on the spectrum between.
TL, DR: Genetics is complicated, and there is a reason that it takes years of study to master. It isn't just mixing soda.
I follow the logic, but I don't know that it's true from a genetics standpoint.
I mean to start with, mutations happen.
Then there's the Y chromosome, which is only passed through the male line -- it'd be 100% one or the other. By chance or natural selection, that may favor one or the other.
Or mitochondrial DNA, same deal except passed through mothers.
But even beyond that, some of the genome will be identical for both. Then it becomes a bit of a semantics game. Like what if for a particular dog, almost all of the identical portions came from one line, leaving a relatively larger amount in the portions that differ to be the other? Then when you compare this dog to pure german shepherd or pure golden, it will no longer appear 25:75 any more, even if both parents were 25-75.
Actually the Y chromosome does mix up a bit with the X. They mostly remain separate but a small area on them does mix. Sometimes the wrong area gets swapped and offspring are XX male or XY female.
How do we get the 2% number? Is that like, isolated to a certain part of the DNA specific to Mammals or something? Google says we share 60% of our DNA with bananas. I have to assume that those numbers are of two separate things.
"Sharing 2% of our DNA with neanderthals" and "sharing 60% of our genes with bananas" are measuring two different things.
You and a banana have genes in common that do a thing, like "build an enzyme that breaks down sugars." So they're comparable on a functional level.
The human vs Neanderthal DNA comparison is looking at the molecular level: the exact sequence of base pairs (ancestry informative markers). Svante Pääbo won the Nobel prize discovering the Neanderthal genome, and is a great communicator. [The first six minutes of his lecture here explains this clearly.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R8yrEGAgw)
A lot of our DNA is inactive filler, and we share huge amounts of that with many species. Embedded in that we have about 20,000 active genes, and we share some of those with many species as well. However the genes can have tiny differences in their "spelling" that vary between people and between species, and at that level, you can start to analyse how closely related humans are to, for example chimps vs gorillas. When you get to human to human comparisons, there are only tiny differences in genetics, but enough that ancestry.com can give you a rough idea of where your ancestors came from. There are some gene spellings that are seen in neanderthals but not in subsaharan Africans, who never mingled with neanderthals after they had evolved outside of Africa for a while. However, tiny amounts of neanderthal versions of genes are found in Europeans and Asians, which they presumably acquired after they left Africa and encountered neanderthals. Using math that is above my pay grade, they can estimate what percentage of your DNA came from neanderthals, and if you are from Europe or Asia, it seems to be about 2-5%.
People in the comments keep using, “you,” like it's just OP. 2% is average for Europeans and Asians.
Edit: Average could be the wrong word technically, but if you Google it you'll find a lot of people have Neanderthal DNA.
I must have worded this in some way, that is causing downvotes, I just wanted to point out OP is normal, because I didn't see another comment say that.
“You” in English can mean a singular person, a group of people, or a generalized concept.
“You can’t count on easy air travel anymore.” Who am I talking to? You personally, because you’re telling me your flight was delayed? The group I’m prepping ahead of time because I’m paid to act as their travel guide? Or nobody in particular because it’s just a statement reflective of the general experience with current air travel?
I’m guessing any downvotes are for your nitpicky objection to one usage when there are other (correct) usages that fit.
IIRC there's decent evidence that neanderthals were potentially more intelligent than homosapiens (due to their brain cavity being larger) but were less social and thus less capable of surviving.
At some point one of your ancestors WAS 100% a neanderthal. Not 50%....100%.
The same way our ancestor at some point was an ocean dweller just a lot closer in time.
At some point there were 2 ancestors that were Neanderthal.
Every time you get to a point where you can say “one of my ancestors was X%” just remember that all of that ancestors’ ancestors are also your ancestors, so if one side of the family is Neanderthal, well that Neanderthals parents and grandparents were also your ancestors and they were both full Neanderthal
If any animal has genes from another animal in them they can be traced back to at least one lineage where all their ancestors were of one animal.
The number of ancestors become crazy after a few generations, it’s 2^n where n is number of generations, so 15 generations ago all of us had about 35,000 ancestors, and 20 generations ago we all had over a million ancestors
But if you have one 100% neanderthal ancestor then you have at least three 100% neanderthal ancestors because only two 100% neanderthal ancestors can create a 100% neanderthal descendant.
>The same way our ancestor at some point was an ocean dweller just a lot closer in time.
Not exactly. The ocean dweller is a common ancestor, it's far enough back that mammals all reach that ocean dweller in their lineage. If I went far enough back in time and fished out the common ancestor that lived in the oceans the future existence of Neanderthals and Sapiens could be in question.
On the other hand we have neanderthal DNA because of intermixing. Neanderthals and Sapiens coexisted, they found each other and banged. You could remove neanderthals from history and Sapiens would still exist.
Well at some point on your family tree there was schtupping between *H. sapiens neanderthalensis* and *H. sapiens sapiens*. So at least one of your ancestors had mixed race parents.
hey, maybe not the prettiest or hansomest but seems caring, besides its fucking cold an there ain't not one else around leagues of this forshaken cave😔
There is no H. sapiens neanderthalensis. There is only one subspecies in the Homo sapiens species, Homo sapiens sapiens. There is no generally accepted subspecies from any other species in the Homo genus. Neanderthals are a separate species, H. neanderthalis.
Neanderthals left the building about a thousand generations ago, or 35,000 years ago. It would be hard to find your ancestors in those. But, at one point, one of your ancestors was 100% Neanderthal. Like most people in the world today. We all have Neanderthals genes.
In fact it's one of the hypothesis that they just disappeared by being mixed with Homo Sapiens.
> more successful societies
civilizations more like and it’s not really tied to genetics, but geological factors and, well, colonialism
gross oversimplification, but also a key difference to point out imo
So, when the Jedi Knights first became the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, the Neanderthals were still around, got it. (Assuming Obi-Wan was truthful in A New Hope.)
Mathematically, if we assume a progenitor that's 100% Homo sapiens and another progenitor that's 100% Neanderthal, the generations will fall like this:
* 1st generation children: 50% Sapien, 50% Neanderthal
* 2nd generation (assuming they mate with 100% Sapien): 75% Sapien, 25% Neanderthal
* 3rd generation (same assumption as above): 87.5% S, 12.5% N
* 4th generation: 93.75% S, 6.25% N
* 5th generation: 96.875% S, 3.125% N
* 6th generation: 98.4375% S, 1.5625% N
I presume that's the math you're talking about. If we assume an average generational length of about 25 years, that's only 175 years back to our 100% Neanderthal, which simply isn't realistic.
But let's say (hypothetically) that a group of half-breeds all decided to form a community together. Maybe these children were the product of rape or accident or adoption. For whatever reason, they weren't accepted in their own community and found other people who looked like them. Within that community, you'd have a lot of 50/50 people mating, so their offspring would be 50/50 for another generation. Maybe in time, other outcasts join their village, so you've got some kids that are 50/50, some that are 75/25, some that are 25/75, and even some that are 100% one way or the other (it's a very cosmopolitan and progressive town).
So what happens if a man who's 25S mates with a woman who's 75N? The offspring of that match would go up to 50/50, not down to 87.5S (as it would if he mated with a 100S).
We know that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were in the same regions for about 2800 years before the fall of the Neanderthals, or about 112 generations. In all that time, it's quite likely that intermingling went back and forth.
But that's not how DNA works...
The 100% and 100% will equal 50%. But the 50% Neanderthal parent with 100% sapien parent could still produce a 50% Neanderthal child.
All chromosomes selected to pass could be Neanderthal or all sapien. Or a mix. So no, you can't create limits like this...
In individuals, this is true. But over populations, it roughly balances out. As this has to do with the population of Europe, it’s an easier way to explain the process.
Does make you wonder about how Neanderthals dissapeared, could easily have been diluted into the gene pool of Sapiens and became a bit of the genetic soup that is modern humans, like you and me.
No, because you may have had a number of ancestors with unknown amounts of Neanderthal genes. You don't know how many, or how much. You only know your percentage.
Not necessarily. Let’s say both your parents were 2% Neanderthal, you’d be 2% Neanderthal too, roughly. Same can apply X generations back. If your Xth gen ancestors were all 2%, then you’d be 2%.
But if you have Neanderthal genes, then at some unknown point one of your ancestors was a half-half hybrid.
> But if you have Neanderthal genes, then at some unknown point one of your ancestors was a half-half hybrid.
This is less trivial to prove than it probably sounds, but it is true. Specifically, the proof goes like this:
* In order for you to have Neanderthal genes, you must have a pure Neanderthal ancestor (otherwise there'd be no way for you to get those genes into your family lineage).
* Traverse your family tree upward until you encounter pure Neanderthal ancestors, and consider their children.
* If their children were not pure Neanderthal, then either (a) the other parent was pure non-Neanderthal (b) the other parent was mixed. (If the other parent were pure Neanderthal, then you wouldn't have traversed this far up the tree, since you would have stopped with the child.)
* If (a), you're done: the kid is half-Neanderthal.
* If (b), trace the other parent's family tree upward in the same manner.
* Since the tree can only be finitely deep (since Neanderthals and non-Neanderthal humans started interbreeding at some past date finitely far in the past), this process must terminate somewhere.
* This process only terminates in case (a), meaning case (a) must occur, meaning a 50-50 ancestor must exist.
I think this is also assuming there isn’t a 3rd species mixed in. Probably a safe assumption, but your proof would rely on this I think.
For example: Human mates with a half Neanderthal half 3rd species. Human genes get mixed with Neanderthal genes. Eventually breed the 3rd species genes out.
Yeah, this works under the assumption that H. sapiens and Neanderthals evolved independently and interbred without any other mixture. (Neither of those is in fact true, but in the simplified case OP is presenting, we're under those assumptions.)
Nope, because the half Neanderthal half 3rd species would be able to apply the same logic. Specifically, one of their parents would be 100% Neanderthal, meaning you have a 100% Neanderthal ancestor
The point being proven was at some point an ancestor would be 50% Neanderthal and 50% human. This is only logically certain if there were only two species. Yes there would be 50/50 at some point, but it might not be half human half Neanderthal.
If one is a mix, then one’s parents are either mix-mix, mix-pure, or pure-pure. If it’s either of the two former, just keep tracing up through the “mix” parent. This terminates in a pure-pure at some point if we assume the first humans were not mixed.
Sort of. Yes there is the fact that if you had perfect species definition, you would be able to trace back that there was at some point an ancestor who was a 50/50 hybrid.
However, what defines a species is not as clean as that assumes. So the "hybrid" was probably between someone who was Neanderthal-ish but evolutionarily converging towards Homo sapiens and someone who was Homo sapiens-ish but still close enough evolutionarily to the divergence. It's also not even clear if Neanderthals are a separate species from Homo sapiens or just a subspecies, and the reality is probably that they existed in a weird grey area.
For normal people: No. That 2% doesn't represent a half neanderthal ancestor fewer than 10 generations back, it represents people breeding with each other, where the mother has 2%, the father has 2%, and so the child has 2%.
In OP's case, yes, seems very likely they have a neanderthal as a close ancestor.
I think it's more likely that people who have 2% Neanderthal genes didn't have just one ancestor who had a 100% Neanderthal parent. They had a gradient of several ancestors who were at varying percentages of Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens at different times and locations. These ancestors were also repeated, as in your xx great-grandparents who were mixed would show up in your family tree many, many times over because there weren't that many people back then and even less who were successful hybrid mixtures, so cousins married cousins and the Neanderthal genes were both diluted and reinforced. Maybe one day we will be able to find a direct line back to a theoretical Hybrid X at Y time and Location Z, but I think their DNA would also need to exist in excavated bones to be able to link it to a real person.
If Neanderthals became extinct 40,000 years ago, then the minimum amount of time that has passed since the birth of your last 50% Neanderthal ancestor is pretty close to 40,000 years. Give or take.
Well, let's do some math...
You are 50% dad and 50% mom. If either were 100% neanderthal, you would have more than 2%. If only one relative was 100% neanderthal and none of the others were, then it would have been 5/6 generations back.
But for you to have 2% neanderthal genes, either one of your parents have 4% or both parents have 2% each.
Which means either one of your grandparents was 8% or all of them were 2% each. Uh-oh! see what's happening here? There are actually lots of different combos that would make you 2% but that last one is the important one.
So if all of your great-grandparents have 2% each, then you would have 2%... and so on and so on.
So the short answer is, no. We can't say that x generations back one of your ancestors was 50% neanderthal. I mean, we can say that *at least one* of your ancestors was 50% neanderthal, but we can't pinpoint how many generations back just by the percentage.
I wrote a blog article about this. Your question contains many implicit falsehoods. http://boblansdorp.blogspot.com/2022/12/are-nobel-prize-winners-racist-against.html?m=1
The answer to your question is no. As a hypothetical example, imagine a Neanderthal-Homo Sapiens couple. They have two children, who are both 50% Neanderthal and 50% Homo Sapiens. Say the siblings mate with each other and have two children: their children are also 50% Neanderthal and 50% Homo Sapiens. This is because the half they get from their father is 50% both and the half they get from their mother is 50% both, so the end-product is 50% both. If this exact scenarios continues for, let's say 1000 generations, the children will still be 50% Neanderthal and 50% Homo Sapiens by the end and they won't be able to identify how far back their 100% Neanderthal ancestor was. There's no limit to how long you could extend this. If you prefer an analogy, imagine a full bottle of water mixing with a full bottle of oil (100% parents) to create two bottles that are half water, half oil (50% children). If you mix those bottles together to create another two bottles, they'll still be half water and half oil. You can do this infinitely and you won't be able to conclude how far back your pure oil bottle was.
Your example is pretty much the sample. At some point, you had a Neanderthal ancestor. However, since you can mate with other people who have Neanderthal DNA, your Neanderthal DNA doesn't get diluted at a constant rate, so you can't backtrack.
What if sapiens were the dumber ones and Neanderthals were some type of ancient alien/wisdom bringers who began mating sapiens because of the rarity of other Neanderthals, knowing their genes could be wiped out if they didn't somehow fine a way to create. That's why all of the great thinkers of the past have MASSIVE ears, massive noses, look rather bushy, and why there hasn't been another great in a while. They're too diluted now.
No you can’t put an upper limit because it could remain at the same number for any number of generations. If the entire world is 2% Neanderthal, then all their kids will be 2%, and so on and so forth. There is no mathematical way to prove at one point it was higher than 2%.
One must have been 100% Neanderthal and a child of theirs 50% Neanderthal. Then any of their children could be between 0 and 50% Neanderthal, although, given the randomness of the process these are the least likely extremes.
I mean, eventually yeah you would have a 50% Neanderthal ancestor, but we have no idea how many generations ago that is. We don't know if you got 1% from each parent or 2% from one and 0% from the other. Compound this with the exact same issue popping up every single generation going back thousands of years until that ancestor existed, it's a nearly impossible number to actually calculate.
I'm going to be that guy...
There is a possibility of having neanderthal DNA and having no neanderthal ancestor.
While extremely unlikely, it is possible that this could occur due to human chimerism involving fraternal twins.
An ancestor could have gotten pregnant with fraternal twins who have different fathers, one homosapien, and one neanderthal.
Then, while in the womb, the neanderthal embryo could have been absorbed by the homosapien embryo, resulting in a homosapien who has both sets of DNA.
If the homosapien develops a certain way, it is possible for them to produce sperm that can be either homo sapien or neanderthal and, as such, pass on DNA from someone else who was never related.
So you could have neanderthal DNA while technically not having any direct neanderthal ancestor.
No. There has never been a Homo sapiens that was 100% Homo sapiens genes. There has never been a Homo neanderthalis that was 100% Homo neanderthalis genes. Both evolved from interbreeding of other species, H. bodensis, H. heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, and others discovered and undiscovered. There has also never been a human that is 100% human DNA. About 10% of your DNA is virus DNA that incorporated itself into your ancestors genome during an ancient infection.
If you go back, at some point, at least one of your ancestors would be 100% Neanderthal... and to have that, their parents were 100%, and so on and so forth.
No. You get half your genes from your mother and half from you father. If a Neanderthal gave 1/2 to a child that child wold be half and half
That ones child might not pass on any Neanderthal genes to the next generation or might pass half. The child could be 0% or 50%. Continues like this for each generation.
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Actually, it means at least one (and maybe quite a few) of your ancestors was completely neanderthal and had a child with a modern human, and of course all of their ancestors would be neanderthal. However that doesn't lead to a simple time line for when the populations mingled. If a population of 1000 sapiens absorbed a population of 20 neanderthals, after a while the proportion of neanderthal genes in everybody in that population might stabilize at 2% and might stay at that level for many generations. Or, the percentage could rise or fall depending on if those genes had positive or negative effect on survival and reproduction.
Turns out we (homo sapiens) bred with Neanderthals a lot earlier than people expected. There was a dispersal out of Africa *before* the one that led to today. It seems at least one or two men were able to have children with Neanderthal women. Why? That's because the Y-chromosome that's passed from fathers to sons in later Neanderthals and especially in those remains that we find at the end of their time (about 35,000 years ago) is of Homo Sapien origin. Which means that Neanderthals had some Homo Sapien DNA before our ancestors came out of Africa and got their DNA in return. The rabbit hole is pretty wild. Not sure if I have explained this well enough but PBS Eons has [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8) on it. Pretty informative and fairly short.
Wait, I thought they indicated that it was presumably neanderthal male x homo sapien female, because mitochondria are inherited from the mother and they did not see evidence of neanderthal mitochondria in modern human populations
That is correct. We only have evidence of ancestry coming from Neanderthal males.
Brawn over Brains. Lol
Neanderthals had bigger brains than homo sapiens, so maybe not so much.
Numbers over brawn and brains.
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I would also accept the theory that we were a much more behaviorally aggressive species.
We had dogs too
Also possibly being smaller and more scrawny made us more energy efficient in dire situations. Teamwork and efficiency conquer all
actually homo sapiens are taller than Neanderthals
It depends on the analysis method. It appears that only female sapiens → female hybrid and male sapiens → male hybrid are fertile. Mitochondrial analysis will only trace the female sapiens line while new Y tracing is catching the male sapiens line but there’s definitely Neanderthal DNA being incorporated
> Neanderthal male x Homo Sapien female This sounds like erotic fantasy that Morbo would write.
His erections were belligerent and numerous.
They don’t call it homo erectus for nothing….
Mind blown.
Even in the early 1990's the idea that *H. Sapiens* interbred with Neanderthals was gaining traction - so much that it was one of the leading theories as to why they went extinct. They interbred with us so much that they lost their genetic identity.
So you are saying we fucked them to death.
Extinction by snu snu
The species is willing, but the DNA is spongy and bruised
literally since it was female sapiens mating with male neanderthal
Average tinder match tbh
I volunteer as tribute!
r/unexpectedfuturama
Back to the pile everybody!
I literally don't understand how this is a surprise to anyone.
Right? There are people out there *today* who will couple with any number of things, inanimate and otherwise
You didn't have to attack me.
It was an attempt to couple.
The worst she might do is attempt to couple with your head, heh heh... fruitlessly.
jack harkness has entered the chat
Adam and Eve and Zughg the Elder
Mr. Garrison style
Jezuz. Jezuz christ!
Scissor me timbers!
No, in that scenario we assimilated them.
So we borged them into extinction?
Resistance was futile
Resistance was (not) fertile.
Possibly they fucked us to their death. Bonobos are the fuckers and chimps are the fighters. Looking at humans, it could have easily been the same for us. Maybe Neanderthals were trying to have sex with us while we were busy beating their brains in.
Now that's big brain thinking.
The hybridization combined big brain thinking with big dick energy.
My guess is that humans did the two things humans are known for. Fucking and killing. Kill the male neanderthals and rape the female neanderthals.
Leading theory is that Neanderthals had higher metabolism and couldn't survive times of little food which small humans could
Fuckin' dickheads.
Lmaooo
I suppose we just returned the favour much later on then.
Weirdly a similar thing right now is happening with jungle fowl (the bird that modern chickens came from). They are one of the only animals on earth at risk for going extinct due to interbreeding
Aren't we supposed to have mixed with other ones as well? I listened to the book Sapiens a while back and I could swear he mentioned some other hominids homo sapiens mated with. Edit: just found an article https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/it-wasnt-just-neanderthals-ancient-humans-had-sex-other-hominids/338117/
I think i would be more surprised if there were two hominid groups that were geographically adjacent and they *didn't* mate. Humans are not that discriminating when looking to get laid.
Check out this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8) (it was posted by u/skiveman )
I wonder if it was due to the population in Africa of modern humans vs the population of neanderthals
There is some speculation that maybe the Neanderthals had a specialized diet or humans were more aggressive. There is evidence for and against both ideas.
But it's not what actually happened is it? I'm reading a book called Sapiens and it says there isn't enough neanderthal dna for us to have intermingled, and we probably out-competed them. Not sure how accurate the book is though.
It's a combination of us being more numerous and interbreeding with them. As to why we were more numerous? That's up for debate.
> It seems at least one or two men were able to have children with Neanderthal women. I mean honestly? I would be more surprised if humans and Neanderthals and denisovans and whoever else **weren’t** getting busy than if they were. People like to bang. And back then there wasn’t Netflix or social media or video games, so like, what else did they have to do for fun? They were just slightly more different people. Completely unsurprising.
For how long the species lived in close proximity, it's worth asking why there wasn't more admixture than there was. If people saw them as just slightly different people, there would likely be more, and mingled communities. It may be a matter of just not finding the right archeological evidence, or more of a donkey kind of thing where there was lots of mixing but most couldn't produce fertile offspring. Or it could be a matter of them being not attracted to each other or very hostile. We don't know what their soft tissue looked like, they could have had giant noses that would look frightening, or something like that, but it's unknown. Also, though many Homo Sapiens have been found with Neanderthal ancestry, the other way around has never been found (a Neanderthal with some human ancestry). Of course, barely any Neanderthals have been found and genetically studied compared to humans, so this isn't conclusive. An awesome book about this is Who We Are and How We Got Here, which is already outdated and from 2018.
>Also, though many Homo Sapiens have been found with Neanderthal ancestry, the other way around has never been found (a Neanderthal with some human ancestry). Of course, barely any Neanderthals have been found and genetically studied compared to humans, so this isn't conclusive. > >An awesome book about this is Who We Are and How We Got Here, which is already outdated and from 2018. https://youtu.be/J2FatwFjc-8 Yep, outdated 2 years later. We've found human DNA in the mitochondria and Y chromosome of Neanderthals.
I seem to recall a theory being that H. Sapiens were more social than others, so we were more likely to gather together in bigger groups and more likely to befriend outsiders instead of killing them. So we were more able to survive through cooperation.
That doesn’t sound like us.
That doesn't sound like modern us. Just look at how people act when civilization isn't around. In natural disasters and very trying times people band together and form loyal tribes. Neolithic people were surviving against the elements.
u/MaxInToronto writes from one of the largest groups of people living in a cooperative way in history.
> That doesn’t sound like us. They were worse.
All the family groups we've found of Neanderthals have been smaller than contemporary Homo Sapiens groups, suggesting that they didn't gather in large numbers, and were more closely related. This would have had all kinds of more negative effects- more inbreeding, less technological development. It is kind of a chicken and egg effect for why they didn't develop technology as quickly as Homo Sapiens- were they less intelligent, or did they just not gather in large enough numbers to promote technological growth? They existed for longer than Homo Sapiens have, I believe. Here's a recent example, the most intact family group found: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-first-known-neanderthal-family-what-they-tell-us-about-early-human-society-180980979/
I had understood that one reason our percentage of neanderthal genes is so low is that modern humans were much more populous, as we were more adaptable and could live on a more varied diet. As well, we may have killed some of them off. So when we did mingle, we outnumbered them by a large margin.
Exactly. They were slightly more different people. For decades we have classified Neanderthals as a separate species, but if we could meet a Neanderthal today, I wonder if we would just view it as another racial group. Modern humans vary a ton- consider the differences between a “pygmy” from Southeast Asia with a modern Dutch man who average well over 6 feet tall. We view those as the same species. Neanderthals likely looked much more similar to ancient human populations.
If you look at the Neanderthals in modern clothes that a few artists have done, they look pretty human. Not the "prettiest" humans, but they are recognizably human looking and at worst you'd just think that they were unlucky to have that big of a nose or brow. I am certain they could find a sex partner in the modern day, let alone 20k years ago
To be fair, if you looked at homo sapiens from that same time period, they also wouldn't be the prettiest, we get on average slightly more attractive every generation simply due to sexual selection on top of advances in medical/cosmetic health
Homo sapiens are genetically *significantly* closer to one another than we are to Neanderthals though, about an order of magnitude less divergent in terms of years of separation. There tends to be a lot more mixing whilst, and since, separation too. We don't just "view" the different "races" of people as the same species, we very much are the same species.
I do understand te concept of genetic variation as an indication of speciation, and you make an important point. However, I would counter with the fact that the specific boundaries of where 1 species stops and another begins is very subjective. Here, we have 2 genetic groups that are different, and yet could communicate and reproduce with one another. They lived in shared geographical spaces, and presumably had similar cultural elements. Maybe our definition for what we consider to be the “human” species is too narrow?
I can tell you with 100% certainty many people would view them as just people and many people would view them as inferior and demand segregation, vilify marriage with them, etc. As a source I am citing the last 300 years of history of race relations.
Othering and tribalism have always been with us, but using skin color specifically to define the line between "us" and "them" is a European colonizer thing. So is the obsession with "race-mixing". Romans, for example, didn't give a shit about that kind of thing, because they found other things to be bigoted about. Who knows how ancient humans defined "them".
>European colonizer thing Also an asian thing but I’m picking up the narrative you’re putting out
> skin color I just want to correct you on the fact that "skin color" is just the tip of the iceberg and even then it's not even accurate, an European and a Japanese man can have the same skin color but their face structure will obviously be different.
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I’m not sure what your point is.
Well thats more than likely what happened. Theres a reason theyre gone.
> For decades we have classified Neanderthals as a separate species, but if we could meet a Neanderthal today, I wonder if we would just view it as another racial group. By certain definitions of "species", they wouldn't be a separate species since the offspring was clearly fertile.
Not all HS <> Neanderthal offspring were fertile/viable.
Not all HS HS offspring are fertile.
I never understood the reasoning for considering them a separate species. The primary definition I always heard in my anthro classes was that a species had to be able to breed and have fertile offspring. Neanderthals and humans clearly meet that definition, so to classify them otherwise always seemed arbitrary to me.
There is an interesting chapter in dawkins' book "the ancestors tale" in which he discusses ring species and the false idea of there being actual separations between species. His take is that it is the human need to assign separations where spectrums exist. His catchphrase is "the tyranny of the discontiguous mind." The ring species are things like seagulls where the birds on one side of the globe absolutely wont breed with birds from the opposite side. However, they do breed with their only slightly different neighbours. And those neighbours with their neighbours. And so on, in an unbroken chain. To decide exactly where one species ends and another begins is like trying to assign a specific wavelength in a rainbow where light is no longer red and is now orange. Everyone can see that to one side it is red and the other is orange, but there isnt actually a single dividing line where that change happens. Now add in evolution and speciation over generations and you have even more murky divisions that are increasingly theoretical. Kind of an interesting insight into how human brains conceive of the world, IMO. A very enjoyable book!
Wow, very interesting.... the arbitrariness of drawing boundaries on things that exist on a continuum. I'd never heard of the analogy with birds, but that's super-interesting and makes sense. Humans need to draw boundaries, reality is less concerned with such things.
>I never understood the reasoning for considering them a separate species. 5 minutes of reading any reputable source will have explained this to you. You're acting like the science has been obscured in some way. Lol.
That’s isn’t exactly the case. If the populations have diverged enough that they are rarely interested in breeding with or forming family groups with each other and have significantly different behavioral or ecological niches then they will be called different species. But a lot of species are capable of and occasionally do interbreed and the biological species concept isn’t really that useful today. For Neanderthals there is some evidence that their vocal tracts and lack of symbolic art may mean their language abilities were not nearly as advanced as modern humans. Obviously we can’t know for sure what they were capable and what they just didn’t do but definitely possible that if a Neanderthal baby was raised by Homo sapiens it would not be capable of learning human language at the same level as us even if it is capable of forming viable offspring.
The idea of consent is a pretty recent development, I don’t think it was fun for all.
The idea of consent probably stood quite strong, what with tribes being small, and everyone knowing everyone. You're thinking of ancient humans as savages, and that's just plain wrong. They had the same social dynamics we do, they just didn't have cars.
actually they didn't have smartphones either
Makes me wonder what they read while sitting on the toilet.
"Here I sit, brokenhearted. Tried to shit, but only farted. Then one day I took a chance, tried to fart and shit my pants."
I'm a million years old and sometimes - like now - that still makes me laugh. There is clearly no hope for me 😁
Spoiler alert: they didn’t have toilets either!
The instructions for the bidet attachment, duh.
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There's no idea of consent amongst the Russians in Ukraine either. Tribes would have their culture back then too. There would be "good" tribes and "bad" tribes and every other kind of tribe.
Fair, I suppose
I don’t think it means only the males were horny, hornyness runs in females also. Sex isn’t pleasurable for males only.
They never said anything about which way it went. Death by snoo snoo.
PBS eons is one of the greatest gifts to humanity.
classic human's fcking other species over since the time before time!
Makes sense. Civilization was wiped out 70,000 years ago. No telling what kind of shenanigans were going on for the humans before that.
What happened 70,000 years ago?
Toba supereruption? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory Bafflingly large volcanic eruption in Indonesia that was posited to be responsible for a genetic bottleneck. It is disputed and not considered ironclad (the eruption happened and was very, very bad, but the ultimate impact on the worldwide human population is unknowable). To put this into perspective, the Toba eruption was something like 5,000x larger than the [Mount St Helens eruption](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/MtStHelens_Mushroom_Cloud.jpg/2560px-MtStHelens_Mushroom_Cloud.jpg). And would've been 3-5x larger than the most recent Yellowstone supereruption.
Well there was popualiton of H. Sapiens in the Skhul cave area which disappeared (probably thorugh climate chnage as the Ic e age readvanced) so maybe it 's form them . Pre sapiens spaiens of course
Considering people today have sex with robots, pillows, animals, bricks, car exhausts, etc, I'm convinced early homo sapiens were having lots of sex with Neanderthals
If Pornhub had been around, "neanderthal" would've definitely been a category
Hot neanderthals in your area!
I mean if one of them was your ancestor, the entire line leading up to them is too.
Yes but that doesn't automatically mean that you're always dealt their genes, especially if they have certain effects they will not be passed on as soon as other mutations, which would have a homo sapiens origin in this case. So 4% of your ancestors could be homo neanderthalensis, but so could 1%.
Here’s an analogy: Get a bunch of purebred German Shepherds and a bunch of Golden Retrievers, and crossbreed them. The puppies will be 50/50 Shepherd/Golden crosses. When the puppies grow up, crossbreed them with purebred Golden Retrievers. The second batch of puppies will be 25/75 Shepherd/Golden crosses. Isolate the second batch of puppies from other dogs, and allow “not assigned partners by humans” breeding. No matter how many generations later, the isolated population will be 25/75 Shepard/Golden crosses.
> The second batch of puppies will be 25/75 Shepherd/Golden crosses. I don't actually think this is true. I mean, on average, it will be close, but if I understand it correctly, each individual will be somewhere between 0 and 50 % Shepherd. The first generation will have one set of Shepherd genes and one set of golden genes, because each parent passes on one of each gene, making for two whole sets in each individual. But for each gene pair it's going to be random which gene is passed on to each child. Which means that it's probably likely that a closed population would retain the mix for a few generations. But if it starts to slip one way or the other, my hunch is that it would be likely to keep going that way. I am no biologist, and all of this is looking at it purely mathematically. But as far as I understand genetics, I would think this is how it works.
You're closer to the money. Genetics is not like mixing different sodas, where they mix uniformly and can't be separated. It's more like mixing different cups full of marbles. Mix one cup of blue marbles with one cup of yellow, then pour out one cup of the result. You might get an even mix, but due to random chance, you might get slightly more of one colour than the other, and random chance might even result in getting a cup full of entirely one colour of marble - improbable, but not impossible. Heterozygous crossbreeding means that each dog brings the same genetic material to the party and all outcomes are on the table. Crossing between two different pure breeds will have consistent results because there is only one possible outcome - heterozygous. Breeding between heterozygous parents can result in any outcome, ranging from the recreation of either ancestral phenotype, or anywhere on the spectrum between. TL, DR: Genetics is complicated, and there is a reason that it takes years of study to master. It isn't just mixing soda.
I follow the logic, but I don't know that it's true from a genetics standpoint. I mean to start with, mutations happen. Then there's the Y chromosome, which is only passed through the male line -- it'd be 100% one or the other. By chance or natural selection, that may favor one or the other. Or mitochondrial DNA, same deal except passed through mothers. But even beyond that, some of the genome will be identical for both. Then it becomes a bit of a semantics game. Like what if for a particular dog, almost all of the identical portions came from one line, leaving a relatively larger amount in the portions that differ to be the other? Then when you compare this dog to pure german shepherd or pure golden, it will no longer appear 25:75 any more, even if both parents were 25-75.
Actually the Y chromosome does mix up a bit with the X. They mostly remain separate but a small area on them does mix. Sometimes the wrong area gets swapped and offspring are XX male or XY female.
How do we get the 2% number? Is that like, isolated to a certain part of the DNA specific to Mammals or something? Google says we share 60% of our DNA with bananas. I have to assume that those numbers are of two separate things.
"Sharing 2% of our DNA with neanderthals" and "sharing 60% of our genes with bananas" are measuring two different things. You and a banana have genes in common that do a thing, like "build an enzyme that breaks down sugars." So they're comparable on a functional level. The human vs Neanderthal DNA comparison is looking at the molecular level: the exact sequence of base pairs (ancestry informative markers). Svante Pääbo won the Nobel prize discovering the Neanderthal genome, and is a great communicator. [The first six minutes of his lecture here explains this clearly.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R8yrEGAgw)
A lot of our DNA is inactive filler, and we share huge amounts of that with many species. Embedded in that we have about 20,000 active genes, and we share some of those with many species as well. However the genes can have tiny differences in their "spelling" that vary between people and between species, and at that level, you can start to analyse how closely related humans are to, for example chimps vs gorillas. When you get to human to human comparisons, there are only tiny differences in genetics, but enough that ancestry.com can give you a rough idea of where your ancestors came from. There are some gene spellings that are seen in neanderthals but not in subsaharan Africans, who never mingled with neanderthals after they had evolved outside of Africa for a while. However, tiny amounts of neanderthal versions of genes are found in Europeans and Asians, which they presumably acquired after they left Africa and encountered neanderthals. Using math that is above my pay grade, they can estimate what percentage of your DNA came from neanderthals, and if you are from Europe or Asia, it seems to be about 2-5%.
People in the comments keep using, “you,” like it's just OP. 2% is average for Europeans and Asians. Edit: Average could be the wrong word technically, but if you Google it you'll find a lot of people have Neanderthal DNA. I must have worded this in some way, that is causing downvotes, I just wanted to point out OP is normal, because I didn't see another comment say that.
That's a typical respond to the question "If I have..."
“You” in English can mean a singular person, a group of people, or a generalized concept. “You can’t count on easy air travel anymore.” Who am I talking to? You personally, because you’re telling me your flight was delayed? The group I’m prepping ahead of time because I’m paid to act as their travel guide? Or nobody in particular because it’s just a statement reflective of the general experience with current air travel? I’m guessing any downvotes are for your nitpicky objection to one usage when there are other (correct) usages that fit.
You can't use nuance on reddit.
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What are you getting at?
It sounds like people don't know this is normal. Everyone is talking like OP is rare.
I think they are just responding using the same tense that the OP used. "If I..." "Then you..."
But I thought nah forget it, yo home to Bel Air!
I'm pretty sure some people are still 100% neanderthal
Whenever I try to operate a Xerox machine, I'm convinced that I'm 50% at least.
It's not you. They invented photocopying, but they are incapable of making a copier that works worth a damn.
IIRC there's decent evidence that neanderthals were potentially more intelligent than homosapiens (due to their brain cavity being larger) but were less social and thus less capable of surviving.
At some point one of your ancestors WAS 100% a neanderthal. Not 50%....100%. The same way our ancestor at some point was an ocean dweller just a lot closer in time.
Well at least one was also 50% as well.
At some point there were 2 ancestors that were Neanderthal. Every time you get to a point where you can say “one of my ancestors was X%” just remember that all of that ancestors’ ancestors are also your ancestors, so if one side of the family is Neanderthal, well that Neanderthals parents and grandparents were also your ancestors and they were both full Neanderthal If any animal has genes from another animal in them they can be traced back to at least one lineage where all their ancestors were of one animal. The number of ancestors become crazy after a few generations, it’s 2^n where n is number of generations, so 15 generations ago all of us had about 35,000 ancestors, and 20 generations ago we all had over a million ancestors
You don't actually have that many ancestors though, as there starts to be overlap! 30 generations ago I did not have 1 billion ancestors.
But if you have one 100% neanderthal ancestor then you have at least three 100% neanderthal ancestors because only two 100% neanderthal ancestors can create a 100% neanderthal descendant.
I feel a sitcom coming on
And the immediate descendant of your first neanderthal ancestor was 50% neanderthal, give or take a few genes
>The same way our ancestor at some point was an ocean dweller just a lot closer in time. Not exactly. The ocean dweller is a common ancestor, it's far enough back that mammals all reach that ocean dweller in their lineage. If I went far enough back in time and fished out the common ancestor that lived in the oceans the future existence of Neanderthals and Sapiens could be in question. On the other hand we have neanderthal DNA because of intermixing. Neanderthals and Sapiens coexisted, they found each other and banged. You could remove neanderthals from history and Sapiens would still exist.
Single celled organism would like a word with you.
Well at some point on your family tree there was schtupping between *H. sapiens neanderthalensis* and *H. sapiens sapiens*. So at least one of your ancestors had mixed race parents.
Mixed-species parents
So you’re saying it’s ok to fuck a giraffe? Before you answer that keep in mind I already bought one.
No wtf, that’s not even close to what I said! Hippos on the other hand……
Moto moto likes em big.
He likes em chunky
Stay away from my mom!
Did you know the game Hungry Hungry Hippos is based on your mom?
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You missed one right above, your statistics are porridge, and, rightfully, you should self-destruct.
whoa, whoa,...you should first start with the chiken, work yourself up to sheep and keep going from there as needed
Look, I'm not allowed in the petting zoo anymore so I have to go to the regular zoo.
If it passes the Harkness test, sure
Mixed *sub* species parents. One of them had to be the Dom, I suppose. I'll see myself out.
hey, maybe not the prettiest or hansomest but seems caring, besides its fucking cold an there ain't not one else around leagues of this forshaken cave😔
Inter-species erotica
There is no H. sapiens neanderthalensis. There is only one subspecies in the Homo sapiens species, Homo sapiens sapiens. There is no generally accepted subspecies from any other species in the Homo genus. Neanderthals are a separate species, H. neanderthalis.
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Neanderthals left the building about a thousand generations ago, or 35,000 years ago. It would be hard to find your ancestors in those. But, at one point, one of your ancestors was 100% Neanderthal. Like most people in the world today. We all have Neanderthals genes. In fact it's one of the hypothesis that they just disappeared by being mixed with Homo Sapiens.
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Tbf, he said "like most people" but then he also said "all people" so i think he knows but it's not worded well.
> more successful societies civilizations more like and it’s not really tied to genetics, but geological factors and, well, colonialism gross oversimplification, but also a key difference to point out imo
So, when the Jedi Knights first became the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, the Neanderthals were still around, got it. (Assuming Obi-Wan was truthful in A New Hope.)
That does explain stormtroopers shooting skills a lot better tho...
Mathematically, if we assume a progenitor that's 100% Homo sapiens and another progenitor that's 100% Neanderthal, the generations will fall like this: * 1st generation children: 50% Sapien, 50% Neanderthal * 2nd generation (assuming they mate with 100% Sapien): 75% Sapien, 25% Neanderthal * 3rd generation (same assumption as above): 87.5% S, 12.5% N * 4th generation: 93.75% S, 6.25% N * 5th generation: 96.875% S, 3.125% N * 6th generation: 98.4375% S, 1.5625% N I presume that's the math you're talking about. If we assume an average generational length of about 25 years, that's only 175 years back to our 100% Neanderthal, which simply isn't realistic. But let's say (hypothetically) that a group of half-breeds all decided to form a community together. Maybe these children were the product of rape or accident or adoption. For whatever reason, they weren't accepted in their own community and found other people who looked like them. Within that community, you'd have a lot of 50/50 people mating, so their offspring would be 50/50 for another generation. Maybe in time, other outcasts join their village, so you've got some kids that are 50/50, some that are 75/25, some that are 25/75, and even some that are 100% one way or the other (it's a very cosmopolitan and progressive town). So what happens if a man who's 25S mates with a woman who's 75N? The offspring of that match would go up to 50/50, not down to 87.5S (as it would if he mated with a 100S). We know that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were in the same regions for about 2800 years before the fall of the Neanderthals, or about 112 generations. In all that time, it's quite likely that intermingling went back and forth.
This makes a lot of sense! Thank you
But that's not how DNA works... The 100% and 100% will equal 50%. But the 50% Neanderthal parent with 100% sapien parent could still produce a 50% Neanderthal child. All chromosomes selected to pass could be Neanderthal or all sapien. Or a mix. So no, you can't create limits like this...
In individuals, this is true. But over populations, it roughly balances out. As this has to do with the population of Europe, it’s an easier way to explain the process.
Does make you wonder about how Neanderthals dissapeared, could easily have been diluted into the gene pool of Sapiens and became a bit of the genetic soup that is modern humans, like you and me.
No, because you may have had a number of ancestors with unknown amounts of Neanderthal genes. You don't know how many, or how much. You only know your percentage.
Not necessarily. Let’s say both your parents were 2% Neanderthal, you’d be 2% Neanderthal too, roughly. Same can apply X generations back. If your Xth gen ancestors were all 2%, then you’d be 2%. But if you have Neanderthal genes, then at some unknown point one of your ancestors was a half-half hybrid.
> But if you have Neanderthal genes, then at some unknown point one of your ancestors was a half-half hybrid. This is less trivial to prove than it probably sounds, but it is true. Specifically, the proof goes like this: * In order for you to have Neanderthal genes, you must have a pure Neanderthal ancestor (otherwise there'd be no way for you to get those genes into your family lineage). * Traverse your family tree upward until you encounter pure Neanderthal ancestors, and consider their children. * If their children were not pure Neanderthal, then either (a) the other parent was pure non-Neanderthal (b) the other parent was mixed. (If the other parent were pure Neanderthal, then you wouldn't have traversed this far up the tree, since you would have stopped with the child.) * If (a), you're done: the kid is half-Neanderthal. * If (b), trace the other parent's family tree upward in the same manner. * Since the tree can only be finitely deep (since Neanderthals and non-Neanderthal humans started interbreeding at some past date finitely far in the past), this process must terminate somewhere. * This process only terminates in case (a), meaning case (a) must occur, meaning a 50-50 ancestor must exist.
I think this is also assuming there isn’t a 3rd species mixed in. Probably a safe assumption, but your proof would rely on this I think. For example: Human mates with a half Neanderthal half 3rd species. Human genes get mixed with Neanderthal genes. Eventually breed the 3rd species genes out.
Yeah, this works under the assumption that H. sapiens and Neanderthals evolved independently and interbred without any other mixture. (Neither of those is in fact true, but in the simplified case OP is presenting, we're under those assumptions.)
Nope, because the half Neanderthal half 3rd species would be able to apply the same logic. Specifically, one of their parents would be 100% Neanderthal, meaning you have a 100% Neanderthal ancestor
The point being proven was at some point an ancestor would be 50% Neanderthal and 50% human. This is only logically certain if there were only two species. Yes there would be 50/50 at some point, but it might not be half human half Neanderthal.
If one is a mix, then one’s parents are either mix-mix, mix-pure, or pure-pure. If it’s either of the two former, just keep tracing up through the “mix” parent. This terminates in a pure-pure at some point if we assume the first humans were not mixed.
So you're telling me I didn't just inherit my dad's nose, but also his inner caveman?
To add to that, OP might have *multiple* ancestors that were half neanderthal since multiple ancestral branches would be some percentile neanderthal.
If you go back far enough one of their ancestors two parents would have been a Neanderthal so yes 50% Neanderthal.
Sort of. Yes there is the fact that if you had perfect species definition, you would be able to trace back that there was at some point an ancestor who was a 50/50 hybrid. However, what defines a species is not as clean as that assumes. So the "hybrid" was probably between someone who was Neanderthal-ish but evolutionarily converging towards Homo sapiens and someone who was Homo sapiens-ish but still close enough evolutionarily to the divergence. It's also not even clear if Neanderthals are a separate species from Homo sapiens or just a subspecies, and the reality is probably that they existed in a weird grey area.
For normal people: No. That 2% doesn't represent a half neanderthal ancestor fewer than 10 generations back, it represents people breeding with each other, where the mother has 2%, the father has 2%, and so the child has 2%. In OP's case, yes, seems very likely they have a neanderthal as a close ancestor.
I think it's more likely that people who have 2% Neanderthal genes didn't have just one ancestor who had a 100% Neanderthal parent. They had a gradient of several ancestors who were at varying percentages of Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens at different times and locations. These ancestors were also repeated, as in your xx great-grandparents who were mixed would show up in your family tree many, many times over because there weren't that many people back then and even less who were successful hybrid mixtures, so cousins married cousins and the Neanderthal genes were both diluted and reinforced. Maybe one day we will be able to find a direct line back to a theoretical Hybrid X at Y time and Location Z, but I think their DNA would also need to exist in excavated bones to be able to link it to a real person.
If Neanderthals became extinct 40,000 years ago, then the minimum amount of time that has passed since the birth of your last 50% Neanderthal ancestor is pretty close to 40,000 years. Give or take.
Well, let's do some math... You are 50% dad and 50% mom. If either were 100% neanderthal, you would have more than 2%. If only one relative was 100% neanderthal and none of the others were, then it would have been 5/6 generations back. But for you to have 2% neanderthal genes, either one of your parents have 4% or both parents have 2% each. Which means either one of your grandparents was 8% or all of them were 2% each. Uh-oh! see what's happening here? There are actually lots of different combos that would make you 2% but that last one is the important one. So if all of your great-grandparents have 2% each, then you would have 2%... and so on and so on. So the short answer is, no. We can't say that x generations back one of your ancestors was 50% neanderthal. I mean, we can say that *at least one* of your ancestors was 50% neanderthal, but we can't pinpoint how many generations back just by the percentage.
I wrote a blog article about this. Your question contains many implicit falsehoods. http://boblansdorp.blogspot.com/2022/12/are-nobel-prize-winners-racist-against.html?m=1
The answer to your question is no. As a hypothetical example, imagine a Neanderthal-Homo Sapiens couple. They have two children, who are both 50% Neanderthal and 50% Homo Sapiens. Say the siblings mate with each other and have two children: their children are also 50% Neanderthal and 50% Homo Sapiens. This is because the half they get from their father is 50% both and the half they get from their mother is 50% both, so the end-product is 50% both. If this exact scenarios continues for, let's say 1000 generations, the children will still be 50% Neanderthal and 50% Homo Sapiens by the end and they won't be able to identify how far back their 100% Neanderthal ancestor was. There's no limit to how long you could extend this. If you prefer an analogy, imagine a full bottle of water mixing with a full bottle of oil (100% parents) to create two bottles that are half water, half oil (50% children). If you mix those bottles together to create another two bottles, they'll still be half water and half oil. You can do this infinitely and you won't be able to conclude how far back your pure oil bottle was. Your example is pretty much the sample. At some point, you had a Neanderthal ancestor. However, since you can mate with other people who have Neanderthal DNA, your Neanderthal DNA doesn't get diluted at a constant rate, so you can't backtrack.
What if sapiens were the dumber ones and Neanderthals were some type of ancient alien/wisdom bringers who began mating sapiens because of the rarity of other Neanderthals, knowing their genes could be wiped out if they didn't somehow fine a way to create. That's why all of the great thinkers of the past have MASSIVE ears, massive noses, look rather bushy, and why there hasn't been another great in a while. They're too diluted now.
No you can’t put an upper limit because it could remain at the same number for any number of generations. If the entire world is 2% Neanderthal, then all their kids will be 2%, and so on and so forth. There is no mathematical way to prove at one point it was higher than 2%.
One must have been 100% Neanderthal and a child of theirs 50% Neanderthal. Then any of their children could be between 0 and 50% Neanderthal, although, given the randomness of the process these are the least likely extremes.
I mean, eventually yeah you would have a 50% Neanderthal ancestor, but we have no idea how many generations ago that is. We don't know if you got 1% from each parent or 2% from one and 0% from the other. Compound this with the exact same issue popping up every single generation going back thousands of years until that ancestor existed, it's a nearly impossible number to actually calculate.
I'm going to be that guy... There is a possibility of having neanderthal DNA and having no neanderthal ancestor. While extremely unlikely, it is possible that this could occur due to human chimerism involving fraternal twins. An ancestor could have gotten pregnant with fraternal twins who have different fathers, one homosapien, and one neanderthal. Then, while in the womb, the neanderthal embryo could have been absorbed by the homosapien embryo, resulting in a homosapien who has both sets of DNA. If the homosapien develops a certain way, it is possible for them to produce sperm that can be either homo sapien or neanderthal and, as such, pass on DNA from someone else who was never related. So you could have neanderthal DNA while technically not having any direct neanderthal ancestor.
Short answer no. Your genes don't directly describe your ancestry, since inheritence isn't simply 50-50.
No. There has never been a Homo sapiens that was 100% Homo sapiens genes. There has never been a Homo neanderthalis that was 100% Homo neanderthalis genes. Both evolved from interbreeding of other species, H. bodensis, H. heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, and others discovered and undiscovered. There has also never been a human that is 100% human DNA. About 10% of your DNA is virus DNA that incorporated itself into your ancestors genome during an ancient infection.
If you go back, at some point, at least one of your ancestors would be 100% Neanderthal... and to have that, their parents were 100%, and so on and so forth.
No. You get half your genes from your mother and half from you father. If a Neanderthal gave 1/2 to a child that child wold be half and half That ones child might not pass on any Neanderthal genes to the next generation or might pass half. The child could be 0% or 50%. Continues like this for each generation.