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Posts Tagged ‘Neanderthal DNA’

The possibility of small amounts of Homo erectus DNA in modern man does exist. Just like there is trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA, it could be a part of our genetic makeup. This is disputed by some in the genetic field of study, but also has supporters.

The Homo erectus as a species was present on the earth for over 1.2 million years. Their presence has been mainly found in Asia. This period ended some 70,000 to 50,000 years ago with extinction during the Toba catastrophe. This was when the Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, Indonesia erupted. This is thought to be the largest eruption in the history of Earth. It is credited with a 6 to 10-year volcanic winter that dramatically changed the living conditions on earth in a very short time span.

This supervolcano eruption also had long term effects on the world’s climate. It is credited with a 1,000-year period in which the earth’s surface remained cooler than it had been previously. This is also the same time period in which the human evolutionary traces appeared to be bottle necked.  It is estimated that only 1000 to 10,000 breeding pairs of Homo sapiens survived this period.

This bottle necking of the species is the leading reason for the theory that modern man can trace their genetic roots back to three females that survived this catastrophic event.

The intermixing of Homo erectus and Homo sapien could have only occurred in Asia before this event took place. There is some evidence that more people survived this event in Asia than previously known which allowed for some interbreeding between the species after this event, but the possibilities is highly reduced.

There is little to no evidence of male Homo erectus samples in modern man but because of it, genetic makeup female mtDNA from Homo erectus could still be present. There are studies that are being conducted on Homo erectus DNA with the purpose of exploring the past of modern man. With this increasing knowledge, a clearer picture is emerging but is not complete as of this date and time.

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It’s the caveman in all of us that we can now blame for our uncivilized behavior. It turns out humans did not entirely replace Neanderthals 30,000 years ago. There was an overlap of time and place that carries on the Neanderthal gene in some people today.

Based on DNA fragments taken from recent discoveries of ancient bones, scientists have constructed approximately 60 percent of the Neanderthal genome, drafting the sequence from billions of DNA letters .

They’re comparing it to our human genome sequence and finding some surprising results, such as evidence that at one time, Neanderthals and humans mated.

Thanks in part to advances in DNA science researchers are able for the first time to isolate the genes of ancient ancestors. For example, one of the challenges of this kind of work is separating the Neanderthal DNA from the DNA of other microbes and organisms that settled on the bones during decomposition, organisms such as insects.

Powerful computers compare the fragments of DNA sequencing with those of humans and chimpanzees and then they look at the known sequence of ancient plants and ask if it looks more like a human or more like a fungus that invaded the bone after death.

In the case of this latest discover, scientists completed the genome sequences of five modern day humans for comparison to the Neanderthal. They studied people from China, France, Papua New Guinea and two from Africa. The researchers expected that Neanderthal DNA would be equally distant from everyone, however they were shocked to find concentrations of Neanderthal existing in the non-Africans.

This suggests there was inter-breeding occurring in a previously unknown period after our ancestors left Africa, but before modern humans emerged.

So when someone says you have no manners, blame your rude behavior on the little bit of caveman in all of us, or at least, those of us with ancestors from Europe and Asia.

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