Linch, unless you are African then you have 1% to 4% Neanderthal genes, there was interbreeding and presumably we had “mixed” individuals on both sides. Neanderthal (and Denisovans etc) must have had similar levels of consciousness to us so there would have been an exchange of culture. Homo Sapiens are not your only ancestors.
I’m East Asian, which likely means significant Neanderthal and Denisovan influence.
Hmm well I also have small mammal and bacteria ancestors, presumably. So we need a cutoff somewhere. But I guess with my (arbitrary) cutoff of 300K years ago, I’d also be happy to include the non-Homo sapiens ancestors, not that it’s very likely to flip the final answer.
23&me says I have more Neanderthal DNA than 96% of users and my DNA attribution is half-Japanese and half European. Your Neanderthal link doesn’t work for me.
That’s interesting. On the recent episode of Dwarkesh Podcast with David Reich, at 1:18:00, there’s a discussion I’ll quote here:
There was a super interesting series of papers. They made many things clear but one of them was that actually the proportion of non-Africans ancestors who are Neanderthals is not 2%.
That’s the proportion of their DNA in our genomes today if you’re a non-African person. It’s more like 10-20% of your ancestors are Neanderthals. What actually happened was that when Neanderthals and modern humans met and mixed, the Neanderthal DNA was not as biologically fit.
The reason was that Neanderthals had lived in small populations for about half a million years since separating from modern humans—who had lived in larger populations—and had accumulated a large number, thousands of slightly bad mutations. In the mixed populations, there was selection to remove the Neanderthal ancestry. That would have happened very, very rapidly after the mixture process.
There’s now overwhelming evidence that that must have happened. If you actually count your ancestors, if you’re of non-African descent, how many of them were Neanderthals say, 70,000 years ago, it’s not going to be 2%. It’s going to be 10-20%, which is a lot.
Now I don’t know which paper this is referring to but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Linch, unless you are African then you have 1% to 4% Neanderthal genes, there was interbreeding and presumably we had “mixed” individuals on both sides. Neanderthal (and Denisovans etc) must have had similar levels of consciousness to us so there would have been an exchange of culture. Homo Sapiens are not your only ancestors.
I’m East Asian, which likely means significant Neanderthal and Denisovan influence.
Hmm well I also have small mammal and bacteria ancestors, presumably. So we need a cutoff somewhere. But I guess with my (arbitrary) cutoff of 300K years ago, I’d also be happy to include the non-Homo sapiens ancestors, not that it’s very likely to flip the final answer.
23&me says I have more Neanderthal DNA than 96% of users and my DNA attribution is half-Japanese and half European. Your Neanderthal link doesn’t work for me.
That’s interesting. On the recent episode of Dwarkesh Podcast with David Reich, at 1:18:00, there’s a discussion I’ll quote here:
Now I don’t know which paper this is referring to but it’s interesting nonetheless.