Fossil genome reveals ancestral link

A distant cousin raises questions about human origins.

The ice-age world is starting to look cosmopolitan. While Neanderthals held sway in Europe and modern humans were beginning to populate the globe, another ancient human relative lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone in a cave in southern Siberia. A comparative analysis of the genome with those of modern humans suggests that a trace of this poorly understood strand of hominin lineage survives today, but only in the genes of some Papuans and Pacific islanders.

More here: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101222/full/4681012a.html

And Discovery News: http://news.discovery.com/human/human-ancestor-bred-neanderthals-siberia-101222.html

More on Human-Neanderthal Hybridization

Just read two articles concerning Human-Neanderthal hybridization.

The first was in Discovery News about remains they've found in China with a mix of baseline human and neanderthal features.

The second more amusing article in Scientific American is about Ozzy Osbourne's genomes containing Neanderthal hints of DNA.

I'm a Hybrid

Just read the article: Neanderthals may have interbred with humans over at nature.com which simultaneously blew me away and confirmed what I've always thought. Here's an excerpt:

The researchers arrived at that conclusion by studying genetic data from 1,983 individuals from 99 populations in Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Sarah Joyce, a doctoral student working with Long, analyzed 614 microsatellite positions, which are sections of the genome that can be used like fingerprints. She then created an evolutionary tree to explain the observed genetic variation in microsatellites. The best way to explain that variation was if there were two periods of interbreeding between humans and an archaic species, such as Homo neanderthalensis or H. heidelbergensis.

"This is not what we expected to find," says Long.

So Africans are the only true Homo sapiens and everyone else is a mutt? I admit I am not an anthropologist or a geneticist so forgive my pseudo-scientific ramblings here, but this makes total sense to me. Europeans and Asians have been out of Africa for only a relatively short time (50,000 - 100,000 years) which to me isn't enough time to develop all the drastic physical differences between them. But if they hybridized with these other humans who had a lot longer to developed these different traits and then selected for them it makes more sense.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/news.2010.194.html

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/04/early-humans-may-have-bred-wit.html

Update: The newly sequenced Neanderthal genome confirms the above. People of European and Asian descent have from 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/05/06/2295639.aspx

http://news.discovery.com/human/neanderthal-human-interbreed-dna.html