Neanderthals in the blood?

Glenn Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Thu, 01 Jan 1998 21:05:22 -0600

I finally got through a backlog of magazines that I had accumulated last
year. The January issue of Scientific American has an interesting
discussion of the Neanderthal mtDNA which was purported to prove that
Neanderthal was not related to modern man. Kate Wong writes:
"Poplular accounts hailed the research as proof of a recent African origin
for all modern humans, but has the long-standing debate over human origins
really been put to rest? Judging from subsequent reactions among
geneticists and paleoanthropologists, apparently not." Kate Wong, "Ancestral
Quandry," Scientific American, January 1998, p. 30

and

"Simon Easteal, a geneticist at the Australian National University, observes
that chimpanzees and other primates display much more within-species mtDNA
variation than humans do. Taking that into account, he says, 'The amount of
diversity between Neanderthals and living humans is not exceptional.'
"Moreover, many scientists think that too much has been made of this
very short segment of mtDNA, which came from a single individual. The
evolutionary history of mtDNA, a lone gene, is only so informative. 'You
can always construct a gene tree for any set of genetic variation,' says
Washington University geneticist Alan R. Templeton. 'But there's a big
distinction between gene trees and population trees,' he cautions,
explaining that a population tree comprises the histories of many genes..
"In fact, examinations of modern human nuclear DNA undermine the
out-of Africa model by suggesting that some genes have non-African origins.
Univeristy of Oxford geneticist Rosallind M. Harding studies variation in
the betaglobin gene, certain mutations of which cause sickle-cell anemia and
other blood diseases. Harding foufn that one major betaglobin gene lineage,
thougth to have arisen more than 200,000 years ago, is widley distributed in
Asia, but rare in Africa, suggesting that archaic populations in Asia
contributed to the modern gene pool. And studies of the Y chromosome by
Michael F. Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, indicate that
prehistoric population dynamics were much more complicated than simple
replacement. His results reflect migrations both out of and back into
Africa.
"Both Hammer and Harding think the overall picture emergin from the
seemingly inconsisten genetic data best fits one of the 'intermediate'
models of human evoution such as the assimilation model engineered by
Northern Illinois University paleoanthropologist Fred H. Smith. According
to Smith's model, the patterns visible in the fossil record suggest that
both expansion out of Africa an genetic interchange among populations were
at work." p. 32

Smith's view is a variation on Gunter Brauer's hybridize and replacement
model which is what I find most consistent with the entire spectrum of data.
In this model, there was a surge of people coming out of Africa and there
was interbreeding with the local populations. The amount varied and in
general the local genes were swamped by the genes of the invaders. But not
all local genes were lost. This allows us to explain data like the unique
Neanderthal H-O mandibular foramen which occurred in no other ancient
population and which today is almost certainly indicative of European
descent. Both the archaic and modern Europeans have this unique and rare
form of the foramen as part of their genetic heritage. The percentages are:

European H-O Normal
Foramen Foramen
% %

Neanderthal 53 47
African Eves 0 100
Skhul/Qafzeh 0 100
Early U. Paleolithic 18 82
Late U. Paleolithic 7 93
Mesolithic 2 98
Medieval Europeans 1 99
~David W. Frayer, "Evolution at the European Edge: Neanderthal
and Upper Paleolithic Relationships," Prehistoire Europeenne,
2:9-69, Table 7, p. 31

The african Eves are those who left Africa in the out of Africa theory.
Skhul/Qafzeh people are the earliest anatomically modern palestinians dating
around 90,000 years ago. Early upper paleolithic people approximately date
between 40-25,000 years ago and Late upper paleolithic is approximately
25,000 to 10,000. Mesolithic is 10,000 to 8,000.

glenn

Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man

and

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm