Bilbo was a slut

[OwlHoot]

Wasn't so long ago (ten years ago? ) that geneticists were dogmatically insisting there wasn't the faintest hint of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.

Even at the time I was sure that must be nonsense, because you only have to look at some people's Neanderthal like physique (although there is such a thing as parallel evolution, to suit cold climates for example).

Just shows that science is only ever provisional, and one shouldn't assume that a research finding, even if generally accepted, is gospel truth.

[Pondlife]

New genome sequences from two human relatives suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.


Humans interbred with a mysterious archaic population
How the capacity to evolve can itself evolve
The weak statistics that are making science irreproducible
The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several human-like groups living in Newport and the Welsh valleys more than 30 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Bristol.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

FTFY

[vetran]

Mystery humans spiced up ancients

New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.


Humans interbred with a mysterious archaic population
How the capacity to evolve can itself evolve
The weak statistics that are making science irreproducible
The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.