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Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

theatlantic.com

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Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#51

Post by creep »

fein wrote: post #13
kapilkaisare wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he is. Let me try to explain why. I haven't done a DNA ancestry test yet, but I imagine I would be pretty happy to learn that there were several peoples/races?/cultures behind me, beyond my apparent South Asian heritage. This does not imply that I am ashamed of my origins - quite the contrary, in fact - but that I imagine it would be nice to ... be more, a citizen of the world, in a fashion. I would exp…

We've gotten to a point where Europeans seem to be looking for anything to give them some minority culture status. Just take pride in who and what you are and where you came from.

I haven't taken a DNA test but I would be very excited to learn I am 99% European. My family doesn't have a lot of historic records as to our origins. We know we technically started in Russia (on my mother's side), and my father is pure Italian, but other than that we don't know jack shit. If my genetic line came from just one region, I would have hope for piecing together my family's ancestry. As it stands, I feel disconnected from my roots.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#52

Post by sampo »

mhluongo wrote: post #28
noelwelsh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the concept of a species is well defined. Tiger and lions can interbreed, as can donkeys and horses. And then there are ring species. Biology does whatever it does and then humans try to fit words around it. Edit: correct mules to horses

You're thinking donkeys and horses. I believe a mule is the sterile result of that interbreeding.

Mules are mostly sterile, but not 100%. Wikipedia reports some cases where female mules have produced offspring.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#53

Post by creep »

mc32 wrote: post #33
emmelaich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take pride but don't take it too far. I have Irish ancestry among others but find St Patrick's day a little ridiculous. Also, to echo another commenter here, take the classic quote from Samuel Johnson: "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" Also pride is considered to be the worst of the seven deadly sins for good reason. So tempting yet can be so poisonous.

Pride can be good and bad. Being proud to succeed as a single parent, or proud of being the first to graduate university in the family. Proud to be black or proud to be white.... Getting iffy depending on context. Of course, the opposite would be troublesome, ashamed to be black, or ashamed to be white.

Pride in heritage is still important. Genes don't necessarily define a person's success (genes are regulated in expression, and so expression can be changed by environmental factors) but they do anchor an individual to history. They ground a person in eons of time. Being proud to be black or white or anything else is part of that.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#54

Post by creep »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #19
fein wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've gotten to a point where Europeans seem to be looking for anything to give them some minority culture status. Just take pride in who and what you are and where you came from.

It's pretty much frowned upon to be in any way proud to be a pale skinned European; mainstream media demands we feel shame for all the oppression we did in the centuries before our birth. That said, I don't understand how I've can be "proud" of which country you were born in, makes no sense to me.

I was born in Canada and I'm definitely proud of it. Not necessarily that I was born here, but that Canada is the way it is and how it has shaped me. I think that is what pride in a nation really is. Americans who are proud to be Americans are this way because they perceive it to be the most free country in the world, and to be a part of that heritage lends something to pride.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#55

Post by coldacid »

creep wrote: post #51
fein wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've gotten to a point where Europeans seem to be looking for anything to give them some minority culture status. Just take pride in who and what you are and where you came from.

I haven't taken a DNA test but I would be very excited to learn I am 99% European. My family doesn't have a lot of historic records as to our origins. We know we technically started in Russia (on my mother's side), and my father is pure Italian, but other than that we don't know jack shit. If my genetic line came from just one region, I would have hope for piecing together my family's ancestry. As it stands, I feel d…

A lot of people who are "pure X" turn out to be anything but, sometimes in as quickly as three generations. Go for the test and enjoy whatever you get from it.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#56

Post by jccooper »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #48
jbeales wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes fairly logical sense. Neanderthals were fairly well-installed in Europe when modern humans appeared in Africa. As modern humans would have expanded northward into Europe, done their thing with the Neanderthals, (some breeding, lots of killing), and continued eastward, so the human population still in Africa would probably have no Neanderthal DNA, but the population in Asia would carry the results of some int…

I don't think that explanation works. In your scenario, you wouldn't expect humans in Asia to have more Neanderthal DNA than humans in Europe.

As the article notes, there seem to have been several significant post-Ice Age re-populations in Europe, of which one or more of the incoming populations may have had little contact with Neanderthals. "Mixed" populations to the east could have survived more intact.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#57

Post by jccooper »

jack6e wrote: post #11

In another story popular on HN yesterday/today about DNA [0], some of the commenters discussed epigenetics, and the fact that the DNA sequence is simply the "hardware" that encodes what is possible for cells to produce, but there is "software", if you will, above that which determines how sequences of DNA are actually expressed. In these cases of analyzing really old DNA where only the DNA remains, I wonder how resea…

Epigenetics can sometimes influence pigmentation, but expression of human skin and hair colors is pretty explicitly genetic, so you can expect the same results from the same genes a mere several thousand years apart.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#58

Post by delecti »

mc32 wrote: post #17
ryandvm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not heard that either. According to 23andMe, I'm in the 99th percentile for Neanderthal DNA variants and my ancestry report claims I'm a disappointingly un-diverse 99.9% European.

I don't think I'd ever hear a non white say they are disappointed with being 100% what they are, be they Asian, Black, etc. Maybe there are, I've never home across them, but a few whites have this tendency to wish for having "interesting" ancestry like sen. Warren. It's something odd. As if they are somewhat uncomfortable on their own skin. Shame is the wrong word, but i can't find the right descriptor. On the other…

I agree it's odd, and yet still shared that sense of disappointment in the lack of surprises in my 23andMe report. I also don't think it's entirely irrational.

The most interesting result is the least expected result that doesn't include bad news. Outside relatively small circles, the vast majority of white people will lose none of their privilege or social position if they find out their ancestry includes something unexpected. It's clearly pretty widespread too, because all of the 23andMe advertising includes people ostensibly of European descent who find out they've got unexpected ancestry.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#59

Post by KittiHawk »

ryandvm wrote: post #4
fosco wrote: post #2

>Today, surprisingly, the people carrying the most Neanderthal DNA are not in Europe but in East Asia Interesting, I would love to see more information on this -- I had not heard this previously.

I have not heard that either. According to 23andMe, I'm in the 99th percentile for Neanderthal DNA variants and my ancestry report claims I'm a disappointingly un-diverse 99.9% European.

My parents had always told me their grandparents were part Seminole. I liked that because it made me feel more connected to my home.

To find out (through a 23andMe report showing 99.9% Euro genes) it wasn't true was unsettling, like I'm not really who I thought I was and also have much less of a connection to the area. Also disappointed because it means someone in my family lied to all of us about where they came from.

Re: Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

#60

Post by abiox »

smhost wrote: post #47
mc32 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I don't get any of either those assertions. People should be comfortable with who they are. I don't think pride is necessary, but also unnecessary and probably detrimental is to feel uncomfortable with yourself, be that anything, in this case ancestry.

How can you not understand black pride? The story of the Negro that survived the racist horrors of white oppression, the voice of the enslaved person that became La Marseillaise sung at the Haitian revolution, that became jazz, that became hip hop. The impossible resistance against the whitewashing and cultral genocide, the freedom and liberty earned by wielding the spirit of the Enlightenment channeled through the b…

perhaps you were a bit too ready to bask in some romanticism to really speak to what they were saying.
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