Your Neanderthal ancestors

If you ever wondered what really happened to the Neanderthals, you can relax. The gentle, big brained,  spiritual beings from  Europe weren’t entirely wiped out  by their competitive invading  cousins, homo sapiens.

The Neanderthals live on in you, and me. Nearly all modern humans carry Neanderthal genetic material, a Canadian study has revealed. The exceptions are people from sub-Saharan Africa, but Australian Aborigines are included.  

It wasn’t homo sapiens nasty chimp nature that won out, but our bonobo-like drive for sex.  

Your ancestor used tools, had the capacity for complex speech, possibly used cosmetics and may well have had music. They buried their dead with some ritual too, raising questions about what spiritual life they led. The new findings published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution suggest we needn’t mourn the Neanderthal’s death, but celebrate them living on in us.

“This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred,” says Dr. Damian Labuda of the University of  Montreal. His team places the timing of such intimate contacts and/or family ties early on, probably at the crossroads of the Middle East.

Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Meanwhile, early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. The question on everyone’s mind has always been whether the physically stronger Neanderthals, who possessed the gene for language and may have played the flute, were a separate species or could have interbred with modern humans. The answer is yes, the two lived in close association.

“In addition, because our methods were totally independent of Neanderthal material, we can also conclude that previous results were not influenced by contaminating artifacts,” adds Dr. Labuda.

Dr. Labuda and his team almost a decade ago had identified a piece of DNA (called a haplotype) in the human X chromosome that seemed different and whose origins they questioned. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010, they quickly compared 6000 chromosomes from all parts of the world to the Neanderthal haplotype. The Neanderthal sequence was present in peoples across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia.

“There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals. This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details,” says Dr. Nick Patterson, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, a major researcher in human ancestry who was not involved in this study.

“Dr. Labuda and his colleagues were the first to identify a genetic variation in non-Africans that was likely to have come from an archaic population. This was done entirely without the Neanderthal genome sequence, but in light of the Neanderthal sequence, it is now clear that they were absolutely right!” adds Dr. David Reich, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, one of the principal researchers in the Neanderthal genome project.

So, speculates Dr. Labuda, did these exchanges contribute to our success across the world? “Variability is very important for long-term survival of a species,” says Dr. Labuda. “Every addition to the genome can be enriching.” An interesting match, indeed.

 And new evidence on why Neanderthals died out so fast.

Source: University of Montreal