Secular Café: Alternative explanation to our connection with neanderthalls

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

Alternative explanation to our connection with neanderthalls May 3rd 2012, 20:09 Just reading an article from New Scientist and discovered that although DNA evidence suggests that all humans outside of Africa have between 1 and 4% Neanderthall DNA this does not have to mean that we interbred with Neaderthals. An alternative explanation is that two groups evolved in Africa and one left to evolve into both Neaderthals and modern humans. Here is the description from the article. "But there is an alternative explanation for the presence of Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. Imagine that ancient hominin populations in Africa, each with a slightly different genetic makeup, were separated from one another. If one group gave rise to all the hominins that lived outside Africa, while other populations became the ancestors of all Africans, then even without subsequent interbreeding the non-African and Neanderthal populations would share some DNA that African populations would lack. This possibility was mentioned by Green and colleagues in their original paper and has been explored further by Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, who believes that it could explain the distribution pattern of Neanderthal genes found today."

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