Are You Part Neanderthal? Check Your Hair and Teeth

Are you part Neanderthal? Of course we would never consider ourselves to be part brute but that is what our DNA is telling us. A majority of us have a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA within our bodies. Ironically those things that make us look attractive like hair and teeth are more closely tied to our ancient ancestors. 

Studies in the journal Nature and Science help us think about human development from the beginning of time until now. It is believed the Neanderthal was a northern creature while humans came from Africa. Somewhere along the path they interbred and the Neanderthal died off. Apparently, the males were not so great at breeding when mixed. 

Human development appears to be on a continuum from the past to some marked point in the future. Each child creates a new genetic destiny based upon a historical past and develops something unique. As the environment changes, humans change with it to ensure they able to survive and pass on their genetic code. 

Neanderthals died off due to lack of communication skills and environmental adjustments. Modern language appears to be one of the most defining and beneficial aspects of social development. Where Neanderthals could run around in packs of a half dozen humans can now travel in the thousands. 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12961.html

Checking Out with DNA Barcodes

Looks are deceiving among gulls. Young ring-billed gulls have brown spots and can look different than adult gulls. Coding helps to determine if they are the same or different species to avoid mislabeling.Info

DNA mapping of species is becoming a popular practice due to its accuracy. Researchers have difficulty seeing small differences among species that are similar and have moved to mapping chloroplast DNA. (1). The concept has been called DNA barcoding because each species comes with a unique map that helps to denote their origins. 

Researchers believe that the DNA bar coding trend will likely help understand marine species and development (2). Sometimes sea life is hard to discern from each other. At other times, species found on the coast are decomposed and difficult to identify. By testing their DNA they are able to find out what they are, where they came from, and the school that is in the area. 

Bird mapping is already in process. Most bird species diverge by 9.54 % on average and inter-species are different by around .29 % making them discernible from each other (3). Gulls seem to mix up their DNA and are more difficult to measure. It is likely that birds will be the first group to be fully mapped. 

The advantages of DNA mapping are great. Many of us assume that most of the world’s species are already in existence. This is a false assumption as species change, merge, and adjust over time. As the environment changes genetic variability and inter-breeding will create new species that vary from their ancestors in unique ways. This is a necessity in living in a moving and adjusting world where new adaptations are needed to overcome challenges.

Are Native Americans and Europeans Related?

A 24,000-year-old arm bone indicates that Native Americans may be cousins to Eurasians. DNA samples along with current projects to map the DNA of Native Americans have made new discoveries. It was found that the Native Americans share about 18% to 38% with Eurasian and other genomes with East Asians. This may mean that Native Americans are really a mixing of genetics between Eurasians and East Asians that create a distinct identity. 

The scientists originally thought they contaminated the samples and put the tests on hold. A year later, they found the same results. They began to look around the American continent for other examples and came across the 9,000-year-old Paleo-Indian found in Washington. To their amazement this Native had features more European than East Asian. 

It was believed that earlier studies with Eurasian DNA were a result of mixtures with Europeans after settlement and colonization. Now it is possible that such DNA structures are actually deeper and can date back tens of thousands of years. If so, this would mean that Natives have been in the area for a long time and have developed their own ways of life independent of other societies. 

When people view all human life as common, using similar expressions, mannerisms, and processes but with different cultures the idea is no longer farfetched. Other studies that are mapping the mich-DNA are finding similarities in other large groups in other areas indicating that early human development was very interrelated. 

What does this really change for people? Mostly it is about perspective. We often view ourselves as very different but these are cultural differences. At a very deep level, we may all be interrelated and come from similar ancient backgrounds. Over the years, we have learned different ways of surviving within our environments and passed these methods through the generations to create culture.

Mass, et. al. (November 20^th,2013). Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans.  doi:10.1038/nature12736   Journal

Other Reading: 

Washington Post

Scientific American

Video on the History of Native Americans

Is Europe One Big DNA Strand? How Related Are We?

Recent research indicates that Europeans may actually hold similar genetic traits that make most people related to everyone else on the continent. So do you have a great cousin in France or Turkey? The research helps to highlight how a similar ancestry made its genetic line throughout the continent retaining DNA similarity. This same phenomenon may actually exist in other areas of the world as well but has not yet been tested. 

Professor Graham Coop from the University of California recently published on May 7^th, 2013 in the journal PLOS biology that nearly all Europeans are related to each other. “What’s remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago,” (UC Davis, 2013). 

Coop along with his co partner Peter Ralph set out to study DNA samples to trace back family origin to 3000 years ago. What they found through 2,000 samples is that people from the United Kingdom to Turkey have similar relatives just a thousand years ago. The ratio is around 20% of the time there are similar genetic strains. 

Out of all of the European states Italy appears to have the least association with the rest of the European families (Boyle, 2013). One explanation is that they were a heavy trading nation and many different cultures made their way into Italy at one time or another. The more people associated the more they shared genetic material. 

The study confirms a mathematical model proposed by a Yale scientist that indicates we are all sequentially related (Chau, 2013). Accordingly, each regional society shares similar genetic traits to root families. As each generation bears more children the general genetic material becomes more loosely associated. Perhaps one day the world will have similar genetic material throughout all of the population. 

You may be interested in reading the Author Summary below or the entire report at PLOS Biology

Few of us know our family histories more than a few generations back. It is therefore easy to overlook the fact that we are all distant cousins, related to one another via a vast network of relationships. Here we use genome-wide data from European individuals to investigate these relationships over the past 3,000 years, by looking for long stretches of genome that are shared between pairs of individuals through their inheritance from common genetic ancestors. We quantify this ubiquitous recent common ancestry, showing for instance that even pairs of individuals from opposite ends of Europe share hundreds of genetic common ancestors over this time period. Despite this degree of commonality, there are also striking regional differences. Southeastern Europeans, for example, share large numbers of common ancestors that date roughly to the era of the Slavic and Hunnic expansions around 1,500 years ago, while most common ancestors that Italians share with other populations lived longer than 2,500 years ago. The study of long stretches of shared genetic material promises to uncover rich information about many aspects of recent population history.

If we look at Coop & Ralph's research on genetic material and we compare that with Mark Pagel’s work on root words we may find that there is association between the two. One explains genetic material and the other explains language usage throughout Europe. Both studies included Turkey in their findings of similarity. These two studies indicate that we are really not that distant from each other and around 10,000 years ago we may have all been related to everyone else on the planet. If anything else it should teach us to treat each other with some level of care as most of us are related in some way. It would be nice to have this study completed again using material from different parts of the world to see if we are all really from an original root family of people. If we were all related would it change the way you think about yourself? What do you think cousin?

Boyle, A. (May 9^th, 2013). All Europeans are related if you go back just 1,000 years, scientists say. NBC. Retrieved May 9^th, 2013 from http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/07/18107175-all-europeans-are-related-if-you-go-back-just-1000-years-scientists-say?lite

Chau, M. (May 8^th, 2013). How closely related are we to each other? Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved May 9^th, 2013 from http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0508/How-closely-related-are-we-to-each-other

Coop, G. & Ralph, P. (May 7^th, 2013). The geography of recent genetic ancestry across Europe. PLOS Biology, 10 (1371). Retrieved May 9^th, 2013 from http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555

UC Davis (May 7^th, 2013). One European Family. Retrieved May 9^th, 2013 from http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10557