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Thanks for the link Daff, very informative.
I cannot say I am surprised by this, I already know of them anyway. :)
Gail
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I mentioned this on another thread last week... referring to the BNP, funnily enough.... and this is the extract that they would really really hate
The results show that the genomes of non-Africans (from Europe, China and New Guinea) are closer to the Neanderthal sequence than are those from Africa.
The most likely explanation, say the researchers, is that there was limited mating, or "gene flow", between Neanderthals and the ancestors of present-day Eurasians.
Link to the BBC report…….
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8660940.stm
The reports says quite clearly that it is Eurasians with the Neanderthal link, and not present day Africans. But we do have other genetic links to Africa, obviously..... just that I once heard Africans being likened to Neanderthals by a neo nazi fascist, so I wondered very briefly, what he would think of this! I would have loved to see his face.
Love
Daff xxxx
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Wow, what a great read, now will be googling this for the rest of the day.
Gail
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Hi Len.
A recent documentry here in Australia, after three different senior members of our Aboriginal community gave DNA samples, and known to be decendent from some of the first to settle here.
It was also to try and trace their pathway across the continent from ( ie: "Out of Africa" ) to see how they may have travelled, and how they might have intergrated with other small tribes on their journey towards New Guinea & Australia
The first Aboriginal settlers colonized what is now Australia between 40,000 and 80,000 years ago via what is now Papua New Guinea or what is now Indonesia.
The genetic survey, produced by a collaborative team led by scholars at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities, shows that Australia's aboriginal population sprang from the same tiny group of colonists, along with their New Guinean neighbours.
Academics analysed the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome DNA of Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians from New Guinea. This data was compared with the various DNA patterns associated with early humans. The research was an international effort, with researchers from Tartu in Estonia, Oxford, and Stanford in California all contributing key data and expertise.
Until now, one of the main reasons for doubting the "Out Of Africa" theory was the existence of inconsistent evidence in Australia. The skeletal and tool remains that have been found there are strikingly different from those elsewhere on the "coastal expressway" – the route through South Asia taken by the early settlers.
Some scholars argue that these discrepancies exist either because the early colonists interbred with the local Homo erectus population, or because there was a subsequent, secondary migration from Africa. Both explanations would undermine the theory of a single, common origin for modern-day humans.
But in the latest research there was no evidence of a genetic inheritance from Homo erectus, indicating that the settlers did not mix and that these people therefore share the same direct ancestry as the other Eurasian peoples.
Geneticist Dr Peter Forster, who led the research, said: "Although it has been speculated that the populations of Australia and New Guinea came from the same ancestors, the fossil record differs so significantly it has been difficult to prove. For the first time, this evidence gives us a genetic link showing that the Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean populations are descended directly from the same specific group of people who emerged from the African migration."
At the time of the migration, 50,000 years ago, Australia and New Guinea were joined by a land bridge and the region was also only separated from the main Eurasian land mass by narrow straits such as Wallace's Line in Indonesia. The land bridge was submerged about 8,000 years ago.
The results showed that both the Aborigines and Melanesians share the genetic features that have been linked to the exodus of modern humans from Africa 50,000 years ago.
It was quite an interesting Doc.
Cheers. Tony
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That must be a bit of a shock to Racists like the BNP and especially those squalis remnants of the Klu Klux Klan - the Africans are a purer race than Europeans!!! LOL
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A long-awaited rough draft of the Neanderthal genome has revealed that our own DNA contains clear evidence that early humans interbred with Neanderthals.
Such interminglings have been suspected in the past, but there's more: Neanderthals were probably not the only other Homo species early Homo sapiens mixed with.
These findings call into question the familiar story that modern humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and swept aside all other Homo species as they made their way around the globe. "It was a very simple story," says João Zilhão at the University of Bristol, UK. "Its simplicity suggested it would not be true." A more likely scenario is that as H. sapiens migrated, they met and interbred with other Homo species that have all since died out.
The first definitive evidence of interbreeding comes from Svante Pääbo's team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They reported last week that the genome of humans today is roughly 1 to 4 per cent Neanderthal (Science, vol 328, p 710). This holds true for all non-Africans, suggesting that H. sapiens and Neanderthals interbred sometime between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago, after the first humans left Africa but before they split into regional populations.
Another genetic study confirms this. Jeffrey Long at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque presented results from nearly 100 modern human populations at a meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropologists in April. His team found evidence that Eurasians acquired genetic diversity from breeding with other Homo species after they left Africa.(New Scientist)
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