Re: Could our big brains come from Neanderthals?


Lee Olsen wrote:
Jois wrote:

Doesn't this say that 30% of the human population has inferior brains?

Since we don't know what it does in comparison to the
other haplotypes, I think this is going too far. And as
commented below, the question is really "superior or
inferior to what", not in general. This is the real hangup
with the whole "race" debate - people lose the qualification.

No, if I have Roth's explanation right (and I probably don't :-), and
what the article is actually saying,

"Lahn and his coauthors suggest that the haplogroup might have made
Homo sapiens better able to adapt to the Eurasian environments that
Neandertals had occupied long before modern newcomers arrived."

I think this is a garble. The hybrid theory (which is simply
multi-regionalism) suggests that the characteristics that
stuck in the eventual offspring, many generations down the
road, were those that helped with adaptations to far northern
climates. Razib has a great picture of the "Neanderthal Child"
(which I think has been either Photoshopped too much or not
enough). The upshot is that if you met a Neanderthal on the
street in any major city (assuming he was wearing a suit and
a hat) you'd probably think he was a Viking - pale skin, blond
or red hair, blue eyes. That's a guess, but it's got a lot of
reasonably hard data going for it.

The other part of the garble is that microcephalin haplogroup D
has been moving across the entire species (with the weird
and unexplained exception of sub-Saharan Africa) like it was
the best thing since sliced bread. This isn't true of the other
presumed Neanderthal contributions to the common genome.


People were moving out of Africa before AMH came in contact with
Neanderthals - they don't have the D allele?

Right.

That's what the data seems to say.


What does this mean in terms of
race?

Nothing as far as Hss, it might have something to do with Neandertals
being the same species as us.

That brings up the entire question of "what is a species". Right
now, it's a very cloudy question. Some researchers try to lump
the entire genus homo into one species, others try to split it
into ever finer subdivisions. The only thing that's clear is that the
old "can't mate and have offspring" test has gone by the wayside
a long time ago.

And would this give Klein's theory of the great leap that occurred in
the AMH a great leap forward?

No, I thought that at first also, but the advantage was only claimed
for "Eurasian environments." This makes sense because the 10% of
Europens that don't have the special D are not enviromentally
challenged, but probably came more recently from a warmer or an African
type environment. Roth said 100% D in Native Americans. This also is
OK, because their ancestors spent more time farther north (developing
shoveled incisors and such), weeding out the non-Ds, thus finally
ending up in the Americas at 100%.

See my comments on a possible garble above.

I've been taking the 100% in Native Americans to mean that
it got to their ancestors before they crossed the Bering land
bridge about 12 kya, and haven't tried to make it mean more
than that. If you want to talk about pure, unadulterated, go
out and conquor the world bloody-mindedness, you might
want to look at ASPM haplogroup D, and I'm not going to say
much more about it than that, especially since nobody knows
what that haplogroup does with respect to the base, either.
It's just that, if the origin time for that particular variation is
correct (@ 5.7 kya in Mesopotamia), it's got a relative
advantage of somewhere around .06 - the equivalent of
a rocket assist. Given the times, it's not in either Native
Americans nor is it in sub-Saharan Africans. Make of that
what you will historically; just make very sure which side
of the branch the saw is going through.

John Roth



Jois

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Could our big brains come from Neanderthals?
    ... Homo sapiens better able to adapt to the Eurasian environments that ... Neandertals had occupied long before modern newcomers arrived." ... Roth said 100% D in Native Americans. ... It would seem he must reject the accepted dates for Australian ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: A quick question on human evolutionary history...
    ... someone told me recently that Homo Sapiens Sapiens might have ... mean that all European Hss evolved from such hybrids - in fact it would ... Hn was a robust species well adapted to cold and not adapted like Hs to ... Neandertals: ] ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: For Sean Pitman: Some real nested hierarchies
    ... > branch points have been used as an argument that Neandertals should be ... > given a different species classification. ... not ancestral to modern humans. ... (For a start, as I've already told you upthread, the tree is a tree of haplotypes, not a tree of populations, and that's not the only flaw in your argument - John Harshman has already mentioned some of the others.) ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: TV Depiction of the Neanderthal
    ... They were also possibly a good deal more hairy than modern man. ... A bear evokes the same response. ... cross culturally, species wide! ... Maybe the memory of Neandertals is just too distant to still ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: For Sean Pitman: Some real nested hierarchies
    ... given a different species classification. ... has political impliations as well for various modern races of humans. ... not ancestral to modern humans. ... Simply the suggestion that Neandertals are a different "species" based ...
    (talk.origins)