Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

tokenadult 11 years ago |

Readers who are interested in this kind of thing may be interested in the new book by Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes.[1] Pääbo was the first researcher to figure out how to sequence DNA from ancient human beings, starting with Egyptian mummies and eventually leading to the complete sequencing of Neanderthal nuclear genomes.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Svante-P%C3%A4%C3%A4bo/e/B00GJ9XR7O/

walterbell 11 years ago | |

That's also a good book on the politics of such research.

"The Neanderthals Rediscovered", by Papagianni and Morse, has a good chronology of the species based on what is known to date.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0500051771/

defen 11 years ago |

Perhaps not entirely surprising, when you consider how much better Tibetan high-altitude adapations are when compared to Andean people's. So the idea that they evolved in the span of 3,000 years seems suspect. Very interesting that they seem to have picked them up from a relict population - perhaps this is related to the Yeti stories?

winestock 11 years ago | |

Greg Cochran has been making that argument for some time now. Here's his take on the issue: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/rasmus-nielsen/

mtdewcmu 11 years ago |

I wondered this about Neanderthals, now Denisovans: in what sense are they extinct if their progeny still walk the Earth?

meric 11 years ago | |

The same sense dinosaurs are extinct while their progeny still walk/fly on earth.

mtdewcmu 11 years ago | | |

That is a different sense. Totally different timescales, and dinosaurs were many species.

netcan 11 years ago | | |

I think it captures the general fuzziness of it all. "Species" don't really exist. All the classifications and taxonomies are fuzzy, to various degrees. Even parent-offspring is a tricky concept.

Is the Tasmanian Devil facial cancer a new species? Did it evolve/mutate from tasmanian devils? Is it an offspring of a specific devil?

sliverstorm 11 years ago | |

Easy. Tibetans are humans, with a small contribution of special adaptations from another species.

A human that has one Neanderthal gene is not a Neanderthal. Therefore, Neanderthals are still extinct.

mtdewcmu 11 years ago | | |

How many Neanderthal genes make a Neanderthal?

sliverstorm 11 years ago | | |

More than half at least, as a mule is neither donkey nor horse

swombat 11 years ago | | |

We have 50% genetic similarity with bananas - does that make us nearly bananas? More to the point, we have 96%-98.8% (depending on how you calculate it) similarity with chimpanzees. Presumably our similarity to Neanderthals would be very close to 100%

"More than half" is a very poor measure unless you define "more than half" of what. I think it's a fair point to make that Neanderthals are not entirely extinct - a good portion of their genes just are.

I guess one way to look at it is, assume that there are some genetic markers that make someone look asian. Now genocide everyone who's "pure" asian, i.e. has more than 50% of those markers. Would you consider "asian people" to be "extinct" then, even though most if not all of their genetic markers are sill in circulation in the human gene pool?

[*] http://genecuisine.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/human-dna-similari...

dredmorbius 11 years ago | | |

I have had many co-workers I suspect of being mostly banana.

Literature I'm seeing suggests humans and neanderthal were related subspecies. I suspect one measure of "not existing" is when there's no clearly distinguishable neanderthal clan or trait cluster. Though there are people who have features which look strongly neanderthalic.

I've been reading bits and pieces of various aspects of anthropology and human evolution. It seems that cro-magnon man were likely an early sub-species or tribe which settled across northern Africa, as far out as the Azores, and along what's now the Spanish-France border region. All of which now show similar linguistic roots. And suggest that the Basque language, unrelated to others in Europe, is derived from cro-magnon.

The Roma people migrated from India toward southeastern Europe.

And there's solid anthropological evidence of settlements in what is now the Black Sea, living on what was then dry land, prior to it being flooded and inundated about 5600 BC. Now if only there were a flood myth in human tradition ....

mtdewcmu 11 years ago | | |

Ordinarily, different species can't produce fertile offspring. A species thus isolated could go extinct without any ambiguity. So it seems worth making a distinction between complete extinction and when closely-related genetic lines recombine and merge.

sliverstorm 11 years ago | | |

"More than half of the distinct genes", is what I would have written if I was thinking more carefully.

If the notion of "extinct" is as fuzzy as you propose, that implies Homo erectus is not extinct, as we descend directly from them.

mtdewcmu 11 years ago | | |

Mules are sterile, too, so every mule is exactly 50%.

kinleyd 11 years ago |

There's a subgroup of Asians spanning the Himalayas and east Asia that have blue bottommed babies that is generally believed to denote an ancestry that shares Genghis Khan, iirc. Anyone know whether this group is the same as the one that shares the Denisovan gene?

There's one other thing that I think people living in the Himalayas have, myself included, that helps and that is proportionately humongous lungs. This is probably evolution at work over the course of centuries.

hcarvalhoalves 11 years ago | |

> There's a subgroup of Asians spanning the Himalayas and east Asia that have blue bottommed babies

That's funny. I had to Google it because I never heard about that before, but apparently it's extremely common!

According to Wikipedia this trait is common not only on asians but also native americans, so it predates Genghis Khan.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot#Prevalence

kinleyd 11 years ago | | |

That makes sense actually, given the belief that native Americans came from central Asia before the ice melted on the Bering Straits. When you compare native Americans with Asians from around the Himalayan region, the features are strikingly similar. I wonder if native Americans also have the high altitude gene at the same level of probability as Tibetans, given their shared blue bottoms? :)

hcarvalhoalves 11 years ago | | |

Possibly. Look at the Inca Empire. Peru, Bolivia, Chile are all above sea level. Machu Picchu peak is at 2.5km.

qwerta 11 years ago |

> Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

Extinct? Hmmm. Get over it we are partly neanderthals, denisovans and so on.

alexandros 11 years ago |

...And I can't. Not yet anyway. Not until we clone one of them.

gnerd 11 years ago |

Pity we didn't acquire Neanderthal genes for their 1600 cc brains, the largest of any primate species found to date. [1]

Edit: Apologies to the downvoter, I should have substantiated that claim. I have added a source.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/neanderthal-m...