# Modern humans bred with 5 archaic human species?



## Brian G Turner (Jul 15, 2019)

The idea that modern humans bred with Neanderthals is a relatively recent development, and over the past couple of years it appears we bred with another and more mysterious group of archaic humans known as Denisovians.

However, recent genetic research suggests there may have been three more different human species that modern humans interbred with, particularly in Asia:









						Out of Africa and into an archaic human melting pot
					

Genetic analysis has revealed that the ancestors of modern humans interbred with at least five different archaic human groups as they moved out of Africa and across Eurasia.




					phys.org


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## Vertigo (Jul 15, 2019)

Which sort of goes to show that there can't have been all that big a difference between so called 'modern' humans and so called 'archaic' humans.


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## Brian G Turner (Jul 15, 2019)

I often thought the old idea that one hominid neatly evolved into another was likely to be oversimplified. Even still, I'm still surprised at the number of potential interbred "species" - Neanderthals was a given, and possibly a couple more - but 5?!


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## BAYLOR (Jul 15, 2019)

Brian G Turner said:


> I often thought the old idea that one hominid neatly evolved into another was likely to be oversimplified. Even still, I'm still surprised at the number of potential interbred "species" - Neanderthals was a given, and possibly a couple more - but 5?!




In the past the Human species was probable  alot more  diverse the we can imagine today.


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## Vertigo (Jul 15, 2019)

Brian G Turner said:


> I often thought the old idea that one hominid neatly evolved into another was likely to be oversimplified. Even still, I'm still surprised at the number of potential interbred "species" - Neanderthals was a given, and possibly a couple more - but 5?!


I guess because of the sparsity of evidence it's hard to tell how large or small an area each group actually inhabited and therefore hard to imagine how much interaction there was likely to be between them. I really wonder if this is really any more significant than say a modern Caucasian and an Asian having children. Are the genetic differences between these ancestral groups any greater than between our more modern groups? I'm not trying to be facetious I honestly don't know enough about it to know if that's a silly question or not! 

ETA: or maybe it's an indication of just how much travel early humans did!


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## farntfar (Jul 15, 2019)

> Vertigo said:
> 
> 
> > Are the genetic differences between these ancestral groups any greater than between our more modern groups?





			
				The Article said:
			
		

> the ancestors of modern humans mixed with them before the archaic humans became extinct.


It does sound very much like what we would now call ethnic cleansing.


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## Danny McG (Jul 15, 2019)

Sigh ... Once again we end up discussing my first wife


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## Toby Frost (Jul 15, 2019)

This sounds like the plot of Richard Morgan's _Black Man_!


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## sknox (Jul 15, 2019)

Denisovians: an archaic people all named Dennis.


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## Brian G Turner (Jul 15, 2019)

Vertigo said:


> Are the genetic differences between these ancestral groups any greater than between our more modern groups?



From my reading, I get the impression that defining "species" is a lot harder that most people realize. The difference between modern humans and some of those groups might be so small that I wouldn't be surprised if some biologists are already developing a more inclusive definition of _homo sapiens_. 

There's a course at the OU on speciation I'd love to do but I won't have time for - however, my daughter has brought her bioscience textbooks home with her from uni, and I've already baggedone for my summer reading.


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## BAYLOR (Jul 15, 2019)

sknox said:


> Denisovians: an archaic people all named Dennis.



Like the Moclans.  they were an all male species of humanity.


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## Parson (Jul 15, 2019)

Brian G Turner said:


> There's a course at the OU on speciation I'd love to do but I won't have time for - however, my daughter has brought her bioscience textbooks home with her from uni, and I've already bagged one for my summer reading.



And my kids think I'm a nerd?! I'm so far behind of your league it is not even funny.


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## Robert Zwilling (Jul 16, 2019)

Our physical appearances make us look a lot more different than we are. Apparently there are far more "internal" features that operate the body compared to the physical appearance features. Take random people and sample the genes and more likely the people who look the least alike will have more in common with each other than those who look the most alike. Take a couple a hundred people and sample them for Neanderthal genes and around 2 percent of the genes will be Neanderthal in each person. However when you compile a list of all those Neanderthal genes it will have a very large assortment of different Neanderthal genes. It turns out each person has a different 2 percent sampling. I have no idea if the Denisovian genes we carry have the same scrambled assortment. The human ancestry tree covers a lot of branches that eventually disappeared. It does literally look like a tree and as the last one standing we are the trunk. Because of the similarity of all those hominoids just about all those branches could produce offspring when they crossed paths. There were branches going for long periods of time picking up whatever they could from the shorter branches that disappeared. Being the last one standing might be a dubious distinction as that means there is no other "human" group to carry on after us.


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## Vertigo (Jul 16, 2019)

I'm still left wondering whether the others really died out and became extinct or were just absorbed. However I guess the geneticists can tell the difference from the traces. ie. if we had equal percentages of each other groups genes then absorption would seem the most likely scenario but as, or so I believe, all the other group's genes are pretty small percentages. I guess that indicates only a small amount of interbreeding and the rest just dying out. Out-competed I suppose.


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## Venusian Broon (Jul 16, 2019)

Vertigo said:


> I'm still left wondering whether the others really died out and became extinct or were just absorbed. However I guess the geneticists can tell the difference from the traces. ie. if we had equal percentages of each other groups genes then absorption would seem the most likely scenario but as, or so I believe, all the other group's genes are pretty small percentages. I guess that indicates only a small amount of interbreeding and the rest just dying out. Out-competed I suppose.



This is just off-the-cuff so I may be wrong, but I seem to remember reading that the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens was a bit more like that between donkeys and horses. So yes they could both procreate with each other and all combinations could produce offspring, but only Neanderthal males and Sapien females produced a fertile offspring. The other way round made an infertile 'mule'. (Or it might be the other way around). So I think there was that dynamic in any interaction. I think also there is evidence that Neanderthal fertility rates were lower anyway, so even if both groups kept each other at a distance, Sapiens would out-breed them over time. So even if it was all very friendly and peaceful, given that there would be huge numbers of modern humans at some point, and the fertility interaction between both species, the incoming humans would then easily swamp and absorb the Neanderthals. 

What was the estimated percentage of Neanderthal DNA in Europeans? 4-5%? 

So out-competed, yes. I think in the sense that it seems from the archeological record there was just much less innovation in Neanderthal tools and tech, and in the types of hunting/food opportunities they seem to have taken. (From tools and camp sites). We sapiens were able to exploit a lot more food sources and therefore survive in places that Neanderthals would never have thought of going. One must also remember that the Neanderthal is adapted to cold conditions. As the ice age receded they would, like a great many other animals more at home for those periods, at some disadvantage. 

Again I may have misremembered, but I do believe there must have been some cultural interaction, as it appears there was a change in Neanderthal tool construction and artefacts in certain places and times, when we were either coming into an area or going through some innovation ourselves. But there seemed to be a limit on the type of things that were 'adopted' by Neanderthals, meaning either they didn't want them - or even they didn't understand what these new guys were doing - which is part of the suggestion in the book _The Mind in the Cave_, that Neanderthal minds and therefore their consciousness was actually quite different from our own. (Well, I say _our. _I'm European, so I assume I must have a bit of Neanderthal DNA in me somewhere. But you know what I mean! )


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## Brian G Turner (Jul 16, 2019)

Parson said:


> And my kids think I'm a nerd?! I'm so far behind of your league it is not even funny.



Financial necessity meant I spent the last couple of years stacking shelves in a supermarket. That drove me into continuing education, to ensure that the next time I need employment, I can work more to my potential. Just in case freelance writing doesn't work out for the long term.  



Venusian Broon said:


> _The Mind in the Cave_



Your comments are seriously interesting - are they mainly sourced from that book, or do you have a couple of others to recommend?


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## Venusian Broon (Jul 16, 2019)

Brian G Turner said:


> Your comments are seriously interesting - are they mainly sourced from that book, or do you have a couple of others to recommend?



Yes, quite a lot that I splurged out was residual from that book! I gushed about it somewhere on the forums  

It's not really focused on Neanderthals and what happened to them but a key point of comparison is that, as far as we know, Neanderthals never made cave paintings. The speculation why, and why we did is brilliantly argued IMHO.

It really took me down a rabbit hole. (Turns out, perhaps, I'm a natural Shaman! Who'd have thunk it? )

In terms of other books, I do have his next one 'The Neolithic Mind' on my TBR pile, and I'm fascinated what he and his co-author adds or brings to the table. I might have a search and see what other researchers are saying too.


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## Brian G Turner (Apr 25, 2020)

Just bringing this up again, because it was previously assumed that humans bred with Denisovians in Asia, and therefore their renmant genes are specifically present in Asian populations.

However, it's now been found that Icelanders also have Denisovian genes - one interpretation being that Neanderthals and Denisovians interbred as well, and the Denisovian genes got to Iceland through humans breeding with Neanderthals already carrying those genes:









						Neandertals had older mothers and younger fathers
					

When the ancestors of modern humans left Africa 50,000 years ago they met the Neandertals. In this encounter, the Neandertal population contributed around two percent of the genome to present day non-African populations. A collaboration of scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark, deCODE...




					phys.org
				






> Unexpectedly, they also found that Icelanders carry traces of Denisovan DNA, which was previously only thought to be present in East Asians and populations from Papua New Guinea. One possibility is that ancestors of the Neandertal population who mixed with modern humans had earlier also mixed with Denisovans.


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## Robert Zwilling (Apr 26, 2020)

Part of the problem with figuring out what happened is the concept that if there is no evidence of something happening, then it didn't happen. While at the same time this concept seriously downgrades the capabilities of the people being talked. People back in ancient times were probably less fearful of the world than we are today, which means they went a lot farther than we can imagine and did a lot more things than we give them credit for.


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## mosaix (Apr 26, 2020)

It’s interesting. Just what is a ‘modern human’? If we have traces of DNA from these other ‘species’ aren’t we just a ‘melding’ of them all rather than a species in our own right? 

It’s a bit like of talk of ‘us’ and ‘them’ with reference to the Norman Conquest. Isn’t ‘us’ now a mixture of both? The Normans didn’t pack up their bags and leave. They’re still here through inter-breeding.


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## Stephen Palmer (Apr 26, 2020)

The novel I'm about to finish, _Uncanny_, is based on all the themes mentioned above. It's been really good to write, and seems to have gone well so far. I'm hoping to finish it on Thursday. 
For those interested in human evolution, both _homo sapiens_ and other species (if indeed they were!), have a look at the following reviews of books on my blog. 
A Mithen Celebration.
The Smart Neanderthal.
The Neanderthals Rediscovered.
Thinking Big.
The Mind In The Cave.
The Origin Of Our Species.


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## Stephen Palmer (Apr 26, 2020)

Venusian Broon said:


> (Or it might be the other way around).
> 
> What was the estimated percentage of Neanderthal DNA in Europeans? 4-5%?


Neanderthal DNA doesn't occur on the Y chromosome, so a Neanderthal man and an AMH woman would not be able to produce children; an AMH man and a Neanderthal woman could however. The current thinking on proportion of Neanderthal DNA on non-African populations is around 1-2%.


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## Elckerlyc (Apr 26, 2020)

Stephen Palmer said:


> ... so a Neanderthal man and an AMH woman would not be able to produce children...


I am not very familiar with genetics, but would this be the _only_ explanation or the most likely?


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## Foxbat (Apr 26, 2020)

mosaix said:


> It’s interesting. Just what is a ‘modern human’? If we have traces of DNA from these other ‘species’ aren’t we just a ‘melding’ of them all rather than a species in our own right?
> 
> It’s a bit like of talk of ‘us’ and ‘them’ with reference to the Norman Conquest. Isn’t ‘us’ now a mixture of both? The Normans didn’t pack up their bags and leave. They’re still here through inter-breeding.


We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns


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## Parson (Apr 26, 2020)

I think one of the biggest things that could happen from this is that it might be the beginning of the end for racism. We are all ONE race. There are cultural differences, and those are significant, but there is no us and them. It's especially frustrating here in the States. Almost every "African-American" is between 10-15% Anglo, and obviously some are a great deal more than that. But that's not the biggest thing at all. We all came out of Africa. When will our world learn the truth that been known for at least 2 Millennium? "there is no slave or free, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no male or female but we are all one..."


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## mosaix (Apr 26, 2020)

Parson said:


> I think one of the biggest things that could happen from this is that it might be the beginning of the end for racism. We are all ONE race. There are cultural differences, and those are significant, but there is no us and them. It's especially frustrating here in the States. Almost every "African-American" is between 10-15% Anglo, and obviously some are a great deal more than that. But that's not the biggest thing at all. We all came out of Africa. When will our world learn the truth that been known for at least 2 Millennium? "there is no slave or free, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no male or female but we are all one..."



My personal, jaundiced, view @Parson is that racism will never end because it just isn’t logical. 

The football team I support, Manchester City, has several Spanish players. Some of the are crowd favourites. When we play a Spanish club in the European competitions I can racist hear abuse of Spaniards from City fans all around me, even though the ‘Spanish’ team is largely composed of French, German, Dutch players etc. 

I chat to them about it sometimes. 

“Not our Spanish lads, those Spanish bastards!” Is the general response. 

There’s no logic to it.


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## Stephen Palmer (Apr 27, 2020)

Mosaix makes a very good point, which we should remember whenever we ask ourselves why most people in public life do the irrational things they do. People who want power, or who want influence, or who want control or domination, all imagine a gap between themselves and others. Sometimes that gap is manifested as misogyny, sometimes as racism, sometimes as discrimination. That this gap doesn't in fact exist is indeed illogical, irrational - but people like that aren't logical or rational. In fact, nobody is, as shown by that brilliant book _Thinking, Fast & Slow;_ but of course the amount varies enormously, depending on maturity and wisdom. I would expect reasonable behaviour for instance from people like David Attenborough, Susie Orbach, or, thinking of people no longer with us, Dorothy Rowe, Albert Einstein etc. I would not expect reasonable behaviour from somebody whose goal was to pervert reality into a semblance of their own fantasy world: politicians, greedy corporate bosses, people whose main goal is fame for fame's sake, and so on. The wisdom of the world lies within semi-invisible people: thinkers, perceivers, understanders. My own view is that, with luck, and after 10,000 years or so, the illogicality of racism etc will recede as humanity grows up. We are still an incredibly immature species. Our main hope is that understanding, including understanding of ourselves, is a one-way process.


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## Stephen Palmer (Apr 27, 2020)

Elckerlyc said:


> I am not very familiar with genetics, but would this be the _only_ explanation or the most likely?


I don't know!


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## Parson (Apr 27, 2020)

mosaix said:


> My personal, jaundiced, view @Parson is that racism will never end because it just isn’t logical.



(I'm assuming you mean that racism will never end just because it isn't logical.) I agree, with my rendition and also with the original wording to a lesser degree, that racism and true logic are not compatible. I would put the blame down or a common "sin" tribalism. If I look at this in a positive way, I might say that when there are numbers of people who fight against the local tribalism, like you are doing @mosaix, it gives me hope that, like @Stephen Palmer says, humanity might eventually grow up. One of humanity's great gifts is the ability to see things from the perspective of others. The more we can identify with and feel for others, the more mature we become. My hope is that as our genetic heritage is more understood the less people who see the "other" as dangerous and more like "someone a lot like me." ---Sigh! But the counter argument is that this insight, that we are all one, goes back at least as far as most creation stories and we have not made a lot of progress in the intervening 1000's of years.


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## Vertigo (Apr 27, 2020)

Parson said:


> (I'm assuming you mean that racism will never end just because it isn't logical.) I agree, with my rendition and also with the original wording to a lesser degree, that racism and true logic are not compatible. I would put the blame down or a common "sin" tribalism. If I look at this in a positive way, I might say that when there are numbers of people who fight against the local tribalism, like you are doing @mosaix, it gives me hope that, like @Stephen Palmer says, humanity might eventually grow up. One of humanity's great gifts is the ability to see things from the perspective of others. The more we can identify with and feel for others, the more mature we become. My hope is that as our genetic heritage is more understood the less people who see the "other" as dangerous and more like "someone a lot like me." ---Sigh! But the counter argument is that this insight, that we are all one, goes back at least as far as most creation stories and we have not made a lot of progress in the intervening 1000's of years.


I suspect that a large amount of common racism (as opposed to institutional racism) is down to a kind of scapegoat effect (actually institutional racism is perhaps even more based on scapegoating). It sadly seems to be a common facet of human nature to want to have someone to blame for our own woes, someone to look down on, making us feel superior and, therefore I guess, more important, more significant. I think this is why it so often is the same in both directions they feel superior to us, we feel superior to them. About the only way I can ever truly see racism disappearing is if we ever stop being competitive, which, sadly, I suspect will be never.

Please note that my use of us and them here is purely for separation; I could as well have said group A and group B rather than personalising it and hope no one thinks by 'us' I'm implying that all us chronners think that way!!!!


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## mosaix (Apr 27, 2020)

I seem to have diverted the thread. Apologies.


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## Brian G Turner (Apr 27, 2020)

I think the topic would be more properly about species-ism - and obviously early hominids didn't seem to be too affected by that, especially in the right mood. 

What would perhaps be more interesting is whether close relationships and family groups actually developed around these interbreedings.


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## Stephen Palmer (Apr 28, 2020)

Yesterday's Grauniad.


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## Brian G Turner (Jun 26, 2021)

And - a new species of early human in China? Or a Denisovian?









						Scientists hail stunning 'Dragon Man' discovery
					

Chinese researchers unveil an ancient skull that could belong to a completely new species of human.



					www.bbc.co.uk


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## M. Robert Gibson (Jun 26, 2021)

mosaix said:


> It’s a bit like of talk of ‘us’ and ‘them’ with reference to the Norman Conquest. Isn’t ‘us’ now a mixture of both? The Normans didn’t pack up their bags and leave. They’re still here through inter-breeding.


It's the same with the Vikings, and the Angles, and the Saxons, and the Jutes, and the Romans.  They're all still here somewhere, hiding in our genes.


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## Ray Zdybrow (Jun 26, 2021)

Robert Zwilling said:


> UOur physical appearances make us look a lot more different than we are. Apparently there are far more "internal" features that operate the body compared to the physical appearance features. Take random people and sample the genes and more likely the people who look the least alike will have more in common with each other than those who look the most alike. Take a couple a hundred people and sample them for Neanderthal genes and around 2 percent of the genes will be Neanderthal in each person. However when you compile a list of all those Neanderthal genes it will have a very large assortment of different Neanderthal genes. It turns out each person has a different 2 percent sampling. I have no idea if the Denisovian genes we carry have the same scrambled assortment. The human ancestry tree covers a lot of branches that eventually disappeared. It does literally look like a tree and as the last one standing we are the trunk. Because of the similarity of all those hominoids just about all those branches could produce offspring when they crossed paths. There were branches going for long periods of time picking up whatever they could from the shorter branches that disappeared. Being the last one standing might be a dubious distinction as that means there is no other "human" group to carry on after us.


So, it's NOT just like a "Caucasian" mating with an "Asian". 
I would like to say though, I really fancy some Denisovans... it's the giant head


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## Ray Zdybrow (Jun 26, 2021)

Ken MacLeod's baffling novel *Descent* partly circles around this topic. There's another... was it *No Enemy But Time* by Michael Bishop?


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## Aquilonian (Jul 11, 2021)

I'm always fascinated by these reconstructions of ancient people from their bones, which are really just artistic guesswork and very enormously depending on assumptions. For instance reconstructions of Neanderthals vary from brutish and ape-like to really very attractive (well in my opinion anyway!) And this depends entirely on the preconceptions of the recontructor, which tells us more about him or her than about the person whom they're reconstructing. 

The trouble with genetics is that we still know so little, and there's still so much very abstruse scientific debate and very little consensus that the public (including journalists) can understand, but the very little of it that people think they understand impacts upon massively emotive topics i.e. national identity and race.

The fact is we have no idea what homo sapiens and Neanderthals would have thought of one another, when one clan came upon another in the immense wilderness of Palaeolithic Europe. The bottom line is would they have found each other sexually attractive- to the same extent as their own kind, or to a limited extent, or not at all? Because their fertility or lack of it is of no consequence if they didn't have sex. We know from genetic studies that they did interbreed but we don't know in what circumstances.


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## Robert Zwilling (Jul 16, 2021)

Meanwhile, the actual genetic composition of people now and then seems to have taken a big step somewhere though some of the conclusions are based on statistical analysis and extrapolation. The bottom line is that our mixture of genes is relatively new, but the bulk of the genes, 93 percent, belongs to previous human populations no longer present. The basic design, bones, fat, nerves, muscle, organs is pretty the same as it always was, though perhaps a lot less sturdier, it just looks updated because the outer surfaces got a cosmetic remake.
Only 7 percent of modern humans genes are new


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## Bick (Jul 16, 2021)

Parson said:


> I think one of the biggest things that could happen from this is that it might be the beginning of the end for racism. We are all ONE race. There are cultural differences, and those are significant, but there is no us and them. It's especially frustrating here in the States. Almost every "African-American" is between 10-15% Anglo, and obviously some are a great deal more than that. But that's not the biggest thing at all. We all came out of Africa. When will our world learn the truth that been known for at least 2 Millennium? "there is no slave or free, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no male or female but we are all one..."


This is the exact point made, rather well, in Nat Schachner’s classic short story *Ancestral Voices* (Astounding, Dec 1933).


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## JohnM (Jul 17, 2021)

Rather odd speculation here considering we are on "the information super-highway." Anyway, Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced. The key point is that there is evidence that Neanderthals did interbreed with "modern" humans. Then the Denisovians are added. Since all current existing races can interbreed, it appears that both Neanderthals and Denisovians were as human as you or I. The painted depictions of Neanderthals have changed over time. Putting muscle and skin over old skulls does not reveal if Neanderthals were white or some shade of brown. The artist just makes best guesses.

Neanderthals buried their dead. They produced cave paintings.









						70,000-year-old remains suggest Neanderthals buried their dead
					

A Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in a cave in Iraq shows signs of having been deliberately buried – more evidence our cousin species behaved a little like we do




					www.newscientist.com
				












						World's Oldest Cave Art Found—And Neanderthals Made It
					

The findings suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans had the same cognitive abilities.




					www.nationalgeographic.com


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## Robert Zwilling (Jul 17, 2021)

Besides the Neanderthals and Denisovians there apparently are around 21 human species, at least that's how many we have found so far. Around 10 of them intersected, if not interacted with modern humans.


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## JohnM (Jul 17, 2021)

I find that to be highly speculative. Highly speculative.


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