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I just read something interesting on a German site. They say that according to the analysis of ancient hair found in Australia, the aborigines there were the first modern humans to leave Africa, at least 24k years before the ancestors of Europeans and Asians left Africa. Makes me wonder how closely native Australians are related to us, maybe they were from another regions in Africa and thus are not as closely related to the rest of modern humans...
Agreed, just as Neanderthals co-existed with Homo Sapiens, before dying off.
Sort of but not really. Neanderthals mixed with modern humans shortly after leaving Africa, anyone who is not a black African is 4% Neanderthal on average according to Scientists. Black people [or rather Sub Saharan Africans to be politically correct] average 0% Neanderthal genes.
"The researchers found that modern humans and Neanderthals shared 99.7% of their DNA, which was inherited from a common ancestor 400,000 years ago. Further analysis revealed that Neanderthals were more closely related to modern humans who left Africa than to the descendants of those who stayed. Between 1% and 4% of the DNA in modern Europeans, Asians and those as far afield as Papua New Guinea, was inherited from Neanderthals.
"Those of us who live outside Africa carry a little Neanderthal in us," said Professor Pääbo. "Neanderthals probably mixed with early modern humans before Homo sapiens split into different groups in Europe and Asia. The comparison of these two genetic sequences enables us to find out where our genome differs from that of our closest relative."
Interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals may nonetheless have been rare. Just two Neanderthal females in a group of around a hundred humans would have been enough to leave such a trace in our genome, provided that was the group that gave rise to all modern humans outside Africa.
The study, reported in the journal Science, was greeted by scientists as almost certain confirmation that modern humans and Neanderthals mated when the groups crossed paths. "It certainly tells us something about human nature," said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. Ed Green, a senior author on the study at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said: "How these peoples would have interacted culturally is not something we can speculate on in any meaningful way. But knowing that there was gene flow is important, and it is fascinating to think about how that may have happened."
He added: "The scenario is not what most people had envisioned. We found the genetic signal of Neanderthals in all the non-African genomes, meaning that the admixture occurred early on, probably in the Middle East, and is shared with all descendants of the early humans who migrated out of Africa."
Black people [or rather Sub Saharan Africans to be politically correct] average 0% Neanderthal genes.
It's important you made that distinction, not due to political correctness, but simply reality.
A very large percentage of American blacks (and by American I mean all of the Western Hemisphere, not just the US) are, in fact, of mixed blood (mulattoes of various degrees). Obviously, they should average way more than 0% Neanderthal genes inherited from their European and/or other non-black ancestors.
The Sub-Saharan Africans, on the other hand, would have the 0% you mentioned, since racial mixing has been and continue to be extremely limited in that continent, save for a few random areas (the Cape of South Africa being a perfect example, where most of the population are mulatto or, as they call it, coloured).
Often times, Americans (as from the US) tend to be rather shocked to learn that the one-drop-rule doesn't exist in other countries or in genetics/reality.
Why do some people think it's valid to rewrite human history everytime a new sack of bones are found? What if the most important bones are never found?
I think the attraction of religion is that it's static.
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