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Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

#21

Post by kinleyd »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #20
kinleyd wrote: post #17

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…

> 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

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? :)

Re: Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

#23

Post by mtdewcmu »

swombat wrote: post #12
sliverstorm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 goo…

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.

Re: Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

#24

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

kinleyd wrote: post #21
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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? :)

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

Re: Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans

#25

Post by mtdewcmu »

sliverstorm wrote: post #19
swombat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

"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.

Homo erectus lived 1.8 million years ago. Neanderthals lived 33,000 years ago. There's a difference.
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