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.
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.