z40\doc\web\2000\03\neand2.txt Date sent: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 12:36:17 -0500 From: "C. Loring Brace" Timothy Perper/Martha Cornog wrote: > The current issue of Scientific American has an article on Neandertal > evolution and about their possible relationships to H.h. sapiens. > > Tim Perper > And this is what I wrote to the Scientific American in response: March 20, 2000 Letters to the Editor Scientific American 415 Madison Avenue New York, N.Y. 10017-1111 Dear Editor, In your April 2000 issue, Kate Wong raises the question “Who Were the Neandertals” and presents a spectrum of the views currently held. But she leaves out the one that I have advocated for the past four decades. It was not original with me since it was first explicitly proposed by the Smithsonian anthropologist, Aleš Hrdlicka, in his Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1927, “The Neanderthal Phase of Man.” This was subsequently restated by Franz Weidenreich at the American Museum of Natural History in 1943 in “The ‘Neanderthal Man’ and the Ancestors of Homo sapiens.” After another two decades of obscurity, I resurrected it in the context of the neo-Darwinian synthesis as “The Fate of the ‘Classic’ Neanderthals” in Current Anthropology in 1964. That was at the heart of my approach in my book The Stages of Human Evolution (fifth edition, 1995), and I reprint it as Chapter 2 in Evolution in an Anthropological View (2000:57-99). With that as a background, I offer the following comment on Kate Wong’s article. Note that I prefer the original spelling, “Neanderthal,” rather than the revision introduced into German orthography in 1901. When the New York Times science writer, Malcolm W. Browne, reviewed two books on the Neanderthals in the Sunday book review on July 4, 1993, he commented that “The New York Times, founded five years before the first Neanderthal fossil was discovered, has stayed with the original spelling.” So have I. Sincerely yours, C. Loring Brace Professor of Anthropology Curator of Biological Anthropology NEANDERTHALS EVOLVING In “Who Were the Neandertals?” Kate Wong surveys the most widely held positions currently being promoted, but she leaves out the minority view first articulated over seventy years ago. This suggest that those famous fossils were in fact the direct ancestors of the “modern” humans who follow them in time. The late Neanderthals at Saint Césaire and Vindija are markedly less robust than the early ones, and the early “moderns” such as Dolní Vestonice are markedly more robust than living Europeans. If modern form evolved in situ by the simple process of reduction in Neanderthal levels of ruggedness, then it should be no surprise that the Lagar Velho child of 25,000 years ago shows a mosaic of Neanderthal and modern characteristics. Her documentation of the sophistication of Neanderthal cultural capabilities should provide the key reason for the changes in the nature of the forces of selection that allowed that reduction in robustness to take place. While Kate Wong does indeed present a survey of the most prominent current views, this just shows how the majority of the professional students of human “evolution” continue to have trouble with the very idea that humans did indeed evolve. C. LORING BRACE Ann Arbor, Mich. Date sent: Thu, 30 Mar 2000 08:38:52 +0200 From: Kabai Peter To: "H. M. Hubey" Copies to: evolutionary-psychology@egroups.com Subject: [evol-psych] Re: Neanderthals not human ancestors [ Double-click this line for list subscription options ] "H. M. Hubey" wrote: > > Nobody has yet to produce a distance metric based on DNA or bones > which can absolutely show when two skeletons are not the same > species. Size can't be it. Look at the differences in size of > dog breeds. Shape can't be it. Compare a dachsund to a bulldog > or a St. Bernard. > ....... > Suppose the Neandertals did mix with moderns. That would explain why the > distance > comes out to be 600,000, not 2,000,000. > ...... > There is still no answers to how much difference in DNA > constitutes , say, a 90% certainty that the species cannot > interbreed. The study did not make claim on these points: > "There wasn't much, if any mixture, between Neanderthals and modern > humans," said William Goodwin, of the University of Glasgow. "Though > they co-existed we can't find any evidence of genetic material being > passed from Neanderthals to modern humans." Genetic comparison was made one the basis of hypervariable region of mitochondiral DNA in the previous studies, and I guess, in this case too (unfortunately our Unversity had to cancel subscription for Nature, so it takes time for me to get the article). The assumption, that mDNA derives exclusively from the mother is not valid, however, recombinations are pretty rare. The genetic distance between the neanderthalian mDNA and modern human DNA is about 6.5 to 7.5 percent. Such genetic distance can be used to estimate time of divergence. Whatever the genetic distance, if modern and neanderthalian mDNA are clearly distinct, it does not support the hypothesis, that any lineage originating from a Neanderthalian mother and modern human father hvae SURVIVED. This is what the genetic distance suggests. We cannot tell, whether there were any matings between two lineages, or offspring were fertile or not. Nor does the data indicate that neanderthals and humans are two distinct species (in fact, if interested in the actual sequences, look them up at "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis"). Discovery channel published the reconstructed tree at http://www.exn.ca/html/templates/htmlpage.cfm?ID=20000328-52 Sequences from this nature study are not yet available at GenBank, however, one can check the previous Neanderthalian sequences at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=Nucleotide The study of Vila et al on dogs are indeed relevant. That study tested at least 3 hypothesis: 1) Dogs originate from more than a single canid species (as all canids can be interbred) 2) Dog breeds are geneticaly distinct (as they are very different morphologically) 3) Dogs were separated as distinct lineage 10000 years ago (as paleonthology suggested). Data suggested no to all 3 hypothesis. Cheers, Peter Kabai