Whoooohooo! Awsomest thing in the last ten years of genetic news for me! YAAY! WHO HOO!!!
/does a little dance / I want to munch on that delicious data!
Ahem.
Sorry about that.
But people 1 to 4% admixture! This is big! This gets an emotional response from me!That survived more than a thousand generations of selection, the bulk of it is probably neutral but think about how many perfectly usefull and working allels we may have today (since the Neanderthalls where close to us to start with). 600 000 or something years of speration these guys evolved sperate from us for nearly as long as the fictional Vampires in Blindsight.
It seems some of us are have a bit our ancestors picked of another species in our genes! Could this have anything to do with behavioural modernity that started off at about the same time the populations crossbred in the middle east ~100 000 years ago? Which adaptations did we pick up? Think of the possiblities!
Ok I’ll stop the torrent of downvote magnet words and get back to reading about this. And then everything else my grubby little paws can get on Neanderthals, I need to brush up!
Edit: I just realized part of the reason why I got so excited is because it shows I may have a bit of exotic ancestry. Considering how much people, all else being equal, like to play up their “foreign” or “unusual” semimythical ancestors or even roots in conversation, national myths or on the census instead of the ethnicity of the majority of their ancestors this may be a more general bias, that I could of course quickly justify with a evo psych “just so” story but I’ll refrain from that to search for what studies have to say about this.
I definitely think this is top-level post material but I didn’t have enough to say to not piss the people off that think all top level posts need to be at least 500 words long.
I think this is very interesting but I’m not sure it should be a top-level post. Not due to the length but simply because it isn’t terribly relevant to LW. Something can be very interesting and still not the focus here.
It is easier to convince people that there is an interesting discussion to be had relevant to LW if you can discuss its relevance to LW in an interesting fashion when you post it.
More seriously, if there isn’t some barrier to posting, /new will be suffer a deluge of marginally interesting material, and after the transients die out nobody will be watching the posts there, either. I read most new posts because most new posts are substantive.
Neanderthal genome reveals interbreeding with humans:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18869-neanderthal-genome-reveals-interbreeding-with-humans.
Whoooohooo! Awsomest thing in the last ten years of genetic news for me! YAAY! WHO HOO!!! /does a little dance / I want to munch on that delicious data!
Ahem.
Sorry about that.
But people 1 to 4% admixture! This is big! This gets an emotional response from me!That survived more than a thousand generations of selection, the bulk of it is probably neutral but think about how many perfectly usefull and working allels we may have today (since the Neanderthalls where close to us to start with). 600 000 or something years of speration these guys evolved sperate from us for nearly as long as the fictional Vampires in Blindsight.
It seems some of us are have a bit our ancestors picked of another species in our genes! Could this have anything to do with behavioural modernity that started off at about the same time the populations crossbred in the middle east ~100 000 years ago? Which adaptations did we pick up? Think of the possiblities!
Ok I’ll stop the torrent of downvote magnet words and get back to reading about this. And then everything else my grubby little paws can get on Neanderthals, I need to brush up!
Edit: I just realized part of the reason why I got so excited is because it shows I may have a bit of exotic ancestry. Considering how much people, all else being equal, like to play up their “foreign” or “unusual” semimythical ancestors or even roots in conversation, national myths or on the census instead of the ethnicity of the majority of their ancestors this may be a more general bias, that I could of course quickly justify with a evo psych “just so” story but I’ll refrain from that to search for what studies have to say about this.
I definitely think this is top-level post material but I didn’t have enough to say to not piss the people off that think all top level posts need to be at least 500 words long.
I think this is very interesting but I’m not sure it should be a top-level post. Not due to the length but simply because it isn’t terribly relevant to LW. Something can be very interesting and still not the focus here.
There is interesting discussion to be had that is relevant to LW.
How so? I’m not seeing it.
That’s because there isn’t a top-level post yet! :P
The point being that many, many more people read /new than read 400 comments deep in the open thread.
It is easier to convince people that there is an interesting discussion to be had relevant to LW if you can discuss its relevance to LW in an interesting fashion when you post it.
More seriously, if there isn’t some barrier to posting, /new will be suffer a deluge of marginally interesting material, and after the transients die out nobody will be watching the posts there, either. I read most new posts because most new posts are substantive.
And the paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/710