There’s more results on the genetic contribution that Neandertals, Homo neanderthalensis, made to modern day human being:
If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.
Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal’s Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center conducted the study with his colleagues. They determined some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals, but only in people of non-African heritage.
“This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred,” Labuda was quoted as saying in a press release. His team believes most, if not all, of the interbreeding took place in the Middle East, while modern humans were migrating out of Africa and spreading to other regions.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of interbreeding between H. sapiens (our species) and H. neanderthalensis was rejected out of hand. Since sequencing the human and Neandertal genomes, that such interbreeding took place has become the prevailing view. Quite a turnaround.
I wonder how long it will be before the view that H. neanderthalensis is actually H. sapiens neanderthalensis, a human subspecies, fully takes hold? It seems to me that you’ve either got to do that or revisit the idea that differing species cannot produce fertile offspring.
And what about H. erectus? I seem to recall that from time to time there have been some suggestions of interbreeding between our species and erectus. Doesn’t that suggest that H. erectus, too, was a human subspecies? Does the redating of the findings from the Javan Solo River site cast doubt on that or disprove it altogether?
Ever since I was a kid, I felt that Neandertal was somewhere in our family history, as part of our genome. I avidly followed the back-and-forth and am glad to see that my supposition was right.
I’ll try to find the link, but I read last week a piece that is claiming that H. erectus may not be an ancestor at all, but another defunct branch on the bush, playing no direct role in H. sap. ancestry.
There’s long been an argument–largely now discredited–that the different ‘races’ are actually the result of cross breeding among H. sap. and earlier, closely-related hominids. That theory might warrant another look, given what we’re learning about Neandertal as a close cousin.