Posted by
lrudolph on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/DNA-sharing-with-Neandertal-s-tp5612614p5612665.html
On 7 Oct 2010 at 12:58, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> See, perhaps:
>
>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/04/AR2010100405> 700_2.html?waporef=obinsite
> <
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/04/AR201010040> 5700_2.html?waporef=obinsite&sid=ST2010100405975> &sid=ST2010100405975
>
> "Subsequent research this year concluded that 1 to 4 percent of the modern
> human genome comes from Neanderthals, making the link tighter. And while the
> percentage may seem small, Riel-Salvatore says it has to be understood in
> context. Neanderthals, he said, probably never reached a total population
> greater than hundreds of thousands, while Homo sapiens came in far greater
> numbers."
>
> REALLY? What's the denominator? Does "genome" refer to the "genes", in
> which case the denominator consists of the 1 percent of the stuff on the
> chromosomes" that actually codes for a protein. No wait a minute. We share
> 99 percent of that with a chimpanzee, right? So, the denominator would be
> the proportion of the genes (codons) that we DON'T share with chimpanzees,
> that we DO share with neandertals. No. that's not right either. We
> presumably share almost a 100 percent of our genes with neandertals. Can
> anybody help me figure this out?
There's probably no point in trying to "figure out" a
newspaper reporter's version of what a scientific paper
(or even its interviewed author) may or may not have said.
So I won't click on the link before going on my errands;
and with luck an answer will have appeared by the time
I get back.
However, *perhaps* there's a clue in the choice of the
phrase "comes from", which might mean something distinct
from "shared with". After all, *none* of the human
genome "comes from" chimpanzees, no matter how much of
it is "shared with" chimpanzees. But if this article
is related to one I recently saw, which asserted that
(1) yes, Neanderthals were a different species from
_Homo sapiens sapiens_ (just as chimpanzees are), but
(2) the two species could and did produce significant
numbers of fertile hybrids (which is not the case with
Homo and Pan, I believe), then it would indeed be so
that some of the modern _Homo sapiens sapiens_ genome
could be said to be "shared with" both the genome of
pre-interbreeding Hss and the Neanderthal genome; and
it might even be possible to decide what, and/or how
much.
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