The Neanderthals amongst us: short video

[guy]

There have been several previous posts about Neanderthals. Here’s a nice short video review:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited 9 hours ago by guy

[guidoLaMoto]

Fascinating. How did either species ever survive? Life was tough in The Jungle.

The fad has been to claim we still carry 1-2% "Neanderthal genes" with the implication that interbreeding was the source....but I'm not convinced that it is anything more than a high probability of mutation and back mutation. After all, if allele A has a 1 in X chance of mutating to allele A', then allele A' has the same 1 in X chance of making the same base pair error and mutating to A again.

OTOH- We can make the argument that H.sapiens who lived in small, closely related groups of probably only 10-20 individuals, with minimal contact with other clans, would have quickly accrued the problems of inbreeding if there wasn't a large amount of inter-clan breeding....but there must have been a high level of competition between groups for hunting territory, so a co-operative interbreeding plan was unlikely. They probably were in the habit of kidnapping members of the other groups, ie- our tendency to have "slavery" as part of our societies may well be innate, having survival value for our species-- analogous to flying south for the winter among geese.*

* If goose down is supposed to be so warm, why do geese fly south for the winter?