There has to be a living person that is the very most Neanderthal, it would be cool if the consumer DNA companies consensually released that. It would satiate my curiosity and probably lead to lucrative influencer money for the person revealed
They already got hunted down once, not sure I'd pop my squared jaw out of the hole for this era
BubbleRings 9 minutes ago [-]
Oh I would totally go on the reality TV show My Neanderthal Life if it was me.
bwnkl 2 hours ago [-]
> for example the 2026 discovery that interbreeding was predominantly between Neanderthal males and human females, and not between Neanderthal females and human males.
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
Isn't it believed to be (at least partially) caused by maternofetal Rh incompatibility that was likely to happen with Neanderthal mother and human father?
riffraff 56 minutes ago [-]
> In the 1990s hair-dragging rape scenes in the Clan of the Cave Bear novels (20 million copies sold by 1990) caused the books to be banned from American public libraries.
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
But it's been so long ago, I may misremember.
lovich 7 minutes ago [-]
Never read the books but I do remember my grandmother who owned them and my mother both telling me kids couldn’t read them while giving me full access to dragon riders of pern
ericmcer 1 hours ago [-]
The Neanderthal extinction always made me think that erasure of races in our modern times will follow a similar pattern. People think of the Native Americans as getting wiped out by disease/violence over a few years, but their ultimate end (and every other races end) probably will be similar to Neanderthals: slowly getting bred out of existence until finding someone with >2% DNA is a novelty. Same thing will probably happen to any smaller populations as globalization/interbreeding means massive populations like China/India will end up being the majority of the DNA.
ricksunny 1 hours ago [-]
Yes but draw an arbitrary line around any group. Call them HNdrathals if you want. Define them at one instaneous snapshot in time as 100% conserved gene corpus. Then watch generation after generation, as some of the HNers (against all odds) interbreed with the surrounding populace. After one hundred generations, should we expect many people to be more than 2% HNdrathal? Yet did the HNdrathals ‘die out’?
delichon 57 minutes ago [-]
Careful, HNers are a population with a history of trauma associated with unclosed parentheses. By raising our cortisol levels you may be lowering our fertility rate by exposing us to them.
ricksunny 42 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, edited along w/ several other typos (checks glasses prescription) :)
BubbleRings 6 minutes ago [-]
Wait, what? (Didn’t that ruin the joke?
howunfortunate 1 hours ago [-]
Ok. but ancestral groups are in no way "arbitrary" when it comes to DNA. So what's your point?
naet 32 minutes ago [-]
I'm always surprised at the opposite. We have such distinct ethnicities. It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
Yes, unless some natural or anthropogenic disaster makes it impossible to visit other continents.
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
rayiner 41 minutes ago [-]
With neanderthals it was physical factors. With groups in modern times it’ll probably be cultural factors. Many groups have panda-like reproductive preferences.
SecuredMarvin 2 hours ago [-]
Dig into the words Homo neanderthalensis and you get “the man from the valley of the new man” - a wonderfully ironic name for an extinct human.
Gagarin1917 1 hours ago [-]
I thought this was a new twist on the popular online game
AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago [-]
Sahlins is one of the GOATS of modern anthropology
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
johnkozak 50 minutes ago [-]
That was father Marshall Sahlins, who I agree was one of the greats.
pfdietz 2 hours ago [-]
Is there a replacement now for 23andMe?
Razengan 2 hours ago [-]
When the mammoth is sus.
otterdude 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bwnkl 1 hours ago [-]
Obvious rage bait aside, this is exactly what the author of the book presented in the article cautions against:
> The Neanderthal genome, he warns, remains ‘something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human’.
Maybe read an article before commenting on it.
Rendered at 20:52:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aea6774
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
But it's been so long ago, I may misremember.
I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.
(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-a...
Funnily enough, stopping this 'race mixing' is one of the explicit goals of some pretty horrible people and they have historically tried all sorts of things from eugenics to genocide.
I'd not put it past someone in the future to try and end modern industrial civilization to this end.
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
> The Neanderthal genome, he warns, remains ‘something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human’.
Maybe read an article before commenting on it.