DNA shows ancient humans related to Asians and Native Americans

Early DNA has revealed that humans living some 40,000 years ago in an area near Beijing were likely related to many present-day Asians and Native Americans.

An international team of researchers including Svante Paabo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China.

Analyses of this individual’s DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans.

In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays.

Humans with morphology similar to present-day humans appear in the fossil record across Eurasia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The genetic relationships between these early modern humans and present-day human populations had not yet been established. Qiaomei Fu, Matthias Meyer and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extracted nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a 40,000 year old leg bone found in 2003 at the Tianyuan Cave site located outside Beijing.

For their study the researchers were using new techniques that can identify ancient genetic material from an archaeological find even when large quantities of DNA from soil bacteria are present.

The researchers then reconstructed a genetic profile of the leg’s owner.

“This individual lived during an important evolutionary transition when early modern humans, who shared certain features with earlier forms such as Neanderthals, were replacing Neanderthals and Denisovans, who later became extinct,” study leader Svante Paabo said.

The genetic profile reveals that this early modern human was related to the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans but had already diverged genetically from the ancestors of present-day Europeans.

In addition, the Tianyuan individual did not carry a larger proportion of Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA than present-day people in the region.

“More analyses of additional early modern humans across Eurasia will further refine our understanding of when and how modern humans spread across Europe and Asia,” Svante Paabo added.

Source: DNA India

Was Mating With Neanderthals Good For Human Health?

It's an argument that's been going on for years. Did humans intermingle with Neanderthals? Is there really any evidence to suggest this? Peter Parham, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, seems to think so.



Peter Parham recently presented evidence to the Royal Society in London that Europeans gained many of the genes for human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) from neanderthals. Comparisons of the human and Neanderthal genomes were conducted by Parham to locate similarities and differences in the DNA of modern human populations and Neanderthals.

Read the Story: Mating with Neanderthals Good for Human Health @ Discovery News

Anthropologists Debate: Neanderthal and Human Brains No Longer Similar

I was watching a movie today in an Anthropology class called Neanderthal The Rebirth featured on BBC. Two individual sets of bones were fused together to form an almost complete skeleton of a Neanderthal.

The legs, of course, were a bit shorter, the rib cage flares at the bottom, an indication of the lung capacity and the ability to survive cold climates.

The cranial capacity, however, was compared very closely to modern humans. A endocast was created to study the indentations or imprints left by the brain to study cognitive abilities. There was barely any debate in the mental processing abilities of both modern humans and neanderthals.

Imagine my surprise and disbelief after finding a video today stating neanderthal and human brains are not as similar as once thought.

This video explains the development and research by Svante Paabo of the neanderthal genome at the Max Plank Institution of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Among humans, however, the internal organization of the brain is more important for cognitive abilities than its absolute size is. The brain's internal organization depends on the tempo and mode of brain development.

Website of the Neandertal Genome project