More Neandertal news, as promised!
John Hawks is getting so much traffic that his site is getting bogged down. Anyway, he posts on the two studies that came out on Neandertal genomic sequencing. No big news, Neandertals are very different, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence for mixing resulting in a large load of Neandertal derived genes in modern populations. RPM has more. At my other blog p-ter excises an important point:
[T]his high level of derived alleles in the Neanderthal is incompatible with the simple population split model estimated in the previous section, given split times inferred from the fossil record. This may suggest gene flow between modern humans and Neanderthals. Given that the Neanderthal X chromosome shows a higher level of divergence than the autosomes (R.E.G., unpublished observation), gene flow may have occurred predominantly from modern human males into Neanderthals. More extensive sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is necessary to address this possibility.
In related news, Afarensis and Kambiz are both approaching the problem from a more physical anthropological perspective. This being a historical science all the various angles are necessary in attaining the most crisp perception of the past as it was.
Related: Round up of this topic from last week.