[__ Science __ ] Neanderthals “Didn’t Truly Go Extinct”

[AIG.com]

One scientist shares that this new study “really highlights that what we think as a separate Neanderthal lineage really was more interconnected with our ancestors.”

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[Barbarian]

Most of us, particularly Europeans, carry Neanderthal genes. Doesn't mean that we are Neanderthals. It just means that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals interbred.

 

[D-D-W]

Most of us, particularly Europeans, carry Neanderthal genes. Doesn't mean that we are Neanderthals. It just means that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals interbred.

I have read that red hair is a Neanderthal genetic trait.
It is possible that is why redheads are much less sensitive to anesthesia.

 

[Barbarian]

I have read that red hair is a Neanderthal genetic trait.
It is possible that is why redheads are much less sensitive to anesthesia.

I've read that. Being red-headed myself, that was interesting. Further research shows it's more interesting and more complicated than earlier thought:

One of the very first features suggested as having a Neanderthal origin was red hair. A set of Neanderthal genes responsible for both light hair and skin colour was identified by geneticists more than a decade ago and linked to human survival at high latitude, light poor, regions like Europe.

Because the Neanderthals had lived in Europe for several hundred thousand years, it was reasoned that natural selection gave them light skin and hair colour helping to prevent diseases like rickets from occurring.

But as is so often the case in science, the situation is far more complicated than most of us would have imagined. Red hair wasn’t inherited from Neanderthals at all. It now turns out they didn’t even carry the gene for it!

Red hair is a uniquely human feature, according to a new study by Michael Danneman and Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and published in the The American Journal of Human Genetics.

It’s striking and paradoxical that half of all the Neanderthal genes in our genome play a role in determining skin and hair colour. Yet this new research shows us that Neanderthal genes have no more influence over these features than the unique human genes we carry for them.

What does all of this mean? Well, over time, tens of thousands years in fact, natural selection has produced a fine balance between Neanderthal and human genes for these features. We might think of lightly skinned and haired people today as having the best bits of both genomes for these traits.

Neanderthals didn’t give us red hair but they certainly changed the way we sleep

Geneticists have now firmly established that roughly two percent of the DNA of all living non-African people comes from our Neanderthal cousins. It’s difficult to imagine why our early ancestors would…

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