Alien and Sedition Acts, part 6. Origins of the Goyem (and us?)

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Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The researchers also sequenced five present day human genomes of European, Asian and African origin and compared them with the Neanderthal. To their surprise they found that the Neanderthal is slightly more closely related to modern humans from outside Africa than to Africans, suggesting some contribution of Neanderthal DNA to the genomes of present-day non-Africans. Interestingly, Neanderthals show the same relationship with all humans outside Africa, whether they are from Europe, East Asia or Melanesia. This is puzzling, as no Neanderthal remains have been so far found in East Asia. They lived in Europe and Western Asia.  

The puzzle over the relationship between Neanderthals and early modern humans in Western Asia begins with a skull from the Zuttiyeh site in Israel, from a period known as the Middle Paleolithic. The Zuttiyeh skull was associated with an early Middle Paleolithic industry of the Levant region, or eastern Mediterranean, called the Acheulo-Yabrudian. This industry at Zuttiyeh has been dated to as late as 148,000 years before the present (B.P.) (http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/westasia.htmBar-Yosef, 1998: table 1), but other estimates place the Zuttiyeh skull as early as 200,000 to 250,000 B.P. (Zeitoun, 2001: 522).

The most interesting thing about the Levantine record is that until 47,000 BP, there is no objective basis for predicting whether Neanderthals or early modern humans would ultimately be the most successful, and certainly no way to predict that modern humans would permanently replace the Neanderthals. Because we know the Neanderthal fossil record so well, relative to other hominid fossils, and because we know they became extinct, there is a tendency to see Neanderthals as inevitable evolutionary “losers.” However, studies of their fossils and their archaeological record point to no obvious defects in their adaptations. Neanderthals and their Homo heidelbergensis ancestors evolved and thrived between 300,000-30,000 years ago, nearly a quarter of a million years, in some of the harshest and least hospitable habitats ever occupied by hominids. The picture of the Neanderthals emerging from recent research is one of formidable competitors, humans every bit as worthy of our interest and admiration as our own direct ancestors.