Origin of our species

[waltky]

DNA Evidence Suggests Man 340,000-Years-Old...

The family tree that rewrote human history: Researchers stunned to find DNA submitted to online project dates back 338,000 years
7 March 2013 | Discovery made after American submitted his DNA to a family tree service; DNA traced to Mbo, a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon; Proves last common Y chromosome ancestor lived 338,000 years ago, even though oldest fossil of modern man is only 200,000 years old

A DNA test on an American hoping to trace his family tree has come up with a stunning result - the roots of the human tree date back much further than previously thought. Researchers were shocked when they analysed the DNA of Albert Perry, a recently deceased African-American from South Carolina. 'This lineage diverged from previously known Y chromosomes about 338,000 years ago, a time when anatomically modern humans had not yet evolved,' said Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona. "This pushes back the time the last common Y chromosome ancestor lived by almost 70 percent.'

This time predates the age of the oldest known anatomically modern human fossils. The fossil record dates back about 200,000 years, said Hammer. Either interbreeding with Neanderthals or other populations led to the unusual genetic makeup, he said, or humans evolved far earlier than the extant fossil record suggests. The new divergent lineage - which was found when Mr Perry contacted Family Tree DNA, a company specializing in DNA analysis to trace family roots - branched from the Y chromosome tree before the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in the fossil record.

The team found a similar chromosome in the Mbo, a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon in sub-Saharan Africa

Unlike the other human chromosomes, the majority of the Y chromosome does not exchange genetic material with other chromosomes, which makes it simpler to trace ancestral relationships among contemporary lineages. If two Y chromosomes carry the same mutation, it is because they share a common paternal ancestor at some point in the past. The more mutations that differ between two Y chromosomes the farther back in time the common ancestor lived. The results are published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Originally, Mr Perry's DNA sample was submitted to the National Geographic Genographic Project. When none of the genetic markers used to assign lineages to known Y chromosome groupings was found, the DNA sample was sent to Family Tree DNA for sequencing. Fernando Mendez, a postdoctoral researcher in Hammer's lab, led the effort to analyze the DNA sequence, which included more than 240,000 base pairs of the Y chromosome. Hammer said: 'The most striking feature of this research is that a consumer genetic testing company identified a lineage that didn't fit anywhere on the existing Y chromosome tree, even though the tree had been constructed based on perhaps a half-million individuals or more. 'Nobody expected to find anything like this.'

Read more: The family tree test that rewrote human history: Researchers stunned to find DNA submitted to online service dates back 338,000 years | Mail Online

 

[PUCrussel]

interesting article!

 

[TheOldSchool]

That's some amazing stuff. I can't believe we've gotten to that level of understanding in the field of genetics. It seems like serious genetic research just started a few years ago but I guess it's been around for a long time now.

 

[waltky]

Granny says dat looks like Uncle Ferd an' one o' his fishin' buddies...

Neanderthal Genome Data Sheds Light on Human Ancestors
March 21, 2013 - Scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute have released a final version of a high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome, which could shed light on why humans survived and earlier hominid species did not.

"The genome of a Neanderthal is now there in a form as accurate as that of any person walking the streets today," Svante Paabo, a geneticist, told the Associated Press. Paabo led the research project as part of the Institute’s Evolutionary Anthropology department. Neanderthals are the closest relative to humans and existed as recently as 30,000 years ago. It is believed by many scientists that modern humans, Homo sapiens, drove them to extinction. Humans and Neanderthals became divergent branches on the evolutionary tree more than 300,000 years ago.

Scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute have released a final version of a high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome.

The DNA for the sequencing came from a toe bone found in a Siberian cave is far more detailed than a previous "draft" Neanderthal genome sequenced three years ago by the same team. The DNA confirmed speculation that humans, interbred with Neanderthals as they spread from the African plains to the Middle East and northern Africa, but that it happened about 80,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.

The research team hopes to compare the new genome sequence to that of other Neanderthals, modern humans and Denisovans, another extinct hominid group, the genome of which was extracted from remains in the same cave. Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who wasn't involved in the Leipzig study, told the AP it was "exciting times" for comparative studies of humans and our closest extinct relatives.

Neanderthal Genome Data Sheds Light on Human Ancestors

 

[Oldguy]

The 6000 year old earther's will just claim the measuring process is flawed.

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - we all come down from the 12 tribes o' Israel...

Europeans had common ancestors 1,000 years ago
May 7,`13 -- Europeans appear to be more closely related than previously thought.

Scientists who compared DNA samples from people in different parts of the continent found that most had common ancestors living just 1,000 years ago. The results confirm decade-old mathematical models, but will nevertheless come as a surprise to Europeans accustomed to thinking of ancient nations composed of distinct ethnic groups like "Germans," "Irish" or "Serbs." "What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other," said Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, who co-wrote the study published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Biology.

Coop and his fellow author Peter Ralph of the University of Southern California used a database containing more than 2,250 genetic samples to look for shared DNA segments that would point to distant shared relatives. While the number of common genetic ancestors is greater the closer people are to each other, even individuals living 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) apart had identical sections of DNA that can be traced back roughly to the Middle Ages. The findings indicate that there was a steady flow of genetic material between countries as far apart as Turkey and Britain, or Poland and Portugal, even after the great population movements of the first millennium A.D. such as the Saxon and Viking invasions of Britain, and the westward drive of the Huns and Slavic peoples.

The study did find subtle regional variations. For reasons still unclear, Italians and Spaniards appear to be less closely related than most Europeans to people elsewhere on the continent. "The analysis is pretty convincing. It comes partly from the enormous number of ancestors each one of us have," said Mark A. Jobling, a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, England, who wasn't involved in the study. Since the number of ancestors each person has roughly doubles with each generation, "we don't have to go too far back to find someone who features in all of our family trees," he said. Jobling cited a scientific paper published in 2004 that went so far as to predict that every person on the planet shares ancestors who lived just 4,000 years ago.

Experts say the study's findings need to be compared with what we know about population movements in Europe and elsewhere from other fields, including archeology and linguistics. "Although, as the authors note, the approach is inherently `noisy' (i.e. error-prone), it still does give results for European populations that are in reasonable agreement with historical expectations," said Mark Stoneking, a professor evolutionary anthropology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, who also wasn't involved in the study. "It would be interesting to see this applied in situations where we don't have such good historical information."

MORE

 

[waltky]

At the other end of the spectrum - "Why Gramma, what big eyes ya got...

Humans in 100,000 years: What will we look like?
June 12, 2013 > Homo sapiens have slowly evolved over thousands of millennia, but what happens when modern technology comes into play?

Visual artist, Nickolay Lamm of Pittsburgh, Pa., tried to answer that question. Interested in illustrating how humans would look like in 100,000 years, he asked science for the answers. “Because I'm not expert in evolution, got in touch with Dr. [Alan] Kwan who gave me his educated guess at what we may look like,” Lamm told FoxNews.com in an email. Working with Dr. Kwan, who has a PhD in computational genomics from Washington University, they established “one possible timeline” to future human evolution of sorts. It's not science -- just a "thought experiment," Kwan has clarified -- but it's fascinating to think about.

Published on MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, these changes to modern-day humans were based on the assumption that by the 210th century, scientists will be able to modify human appearances before birth through zygotic genome engineering technology. Kwan based his theories on the accepted idea that between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, the Earth underwent a period of fluctuation in its climate, which resulted in a tripling of the human brain, as well as skull size. Scientists agree that the rapid changes in climate may have created a favorable environment for those with the ability to adapt to new challenges and situations.

100,000 years from now, Dr. Alan Kwan believes that future humans will have much larger eyes and “eye-shine” due to the tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue behind the retina of the eye. This would be done to help protect our eyes from cosmic rays.

This trend has noticeably continued, for British scientists have found that modern humans have less prominent features and higher foreheads than people during medieval times. “My goal is to get people talking and thinking about things they otherwise wouldn't have. For example, this 'Future Face' project is getting people talking about whether or not something like 'Gattaca' may happen,” Lamm told FoxNews.com, referring to the 1997 movie starring Ethan Hawke.

Some have criticized Dr. Kwan for appearing to ignore common scientific knowledge. Such 100,000 year projections are “fantasy,” Razib Khan, a geneticist, told Matthew Herper of Forbes. "This is more of a speculative look than a scientific look into one possible future where human engineering replaces natural evolution in determining human physiology, but we have been very happy that our humble project has garnered so much attention and provided a platform for others share their own vision of the future," Kwan said, according to Lamm.

Read more: Humans in 100,000 years: What will we look like? | Fox News

 

[numan]

'
Pure clap-trap. Natural evolution is dead.

From now on, human evolution will be artificially engineered.

We will have travelled far down the road to becoming cyborgs in decades, not in millennia !!
.

 

[whitehall]

Not too flattering to have the same DNA as "humans who have not evolved". I've been called a neanderthal. Maybe that's a compliment.

 

[waltky]

possum thinks dat's a scarey lookin' skull fer Halloween...

Unique Skull Find Rebuts Theories On Species Diversity in Early Humans
Oct. 17, 2013 — This is the best-preserved fossil find yet from the early era of our genus. The particularly interesting aspect is that it displays a combination of features that were unknown to us before the find. The skull, found in Dmanisi by anthropologists from the University of Zurich as part of a collaboration with colleagues in Georgia funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, has the largest face, the most massively built jaw and teeth and the smallest brain within the Dmanisi group.
=snip=

It is the fifth skull to be discovered in Dmanisi. Previously, four equally well-preserved hominid skulls as well as some skeletal parts had been found there. Taken as a whole, the finds show that the first representatives of the genus Homo began to expand from Africa through Eurasia as far back as 1.85 million years ago.

Diversity within a species instead of species diversity

Because the skull is completely intact, it can provide answers to various questions which up until now had offered broad scope for speculation. These relate to none less than the evolutionary beginning of the genus Homo in Africa around two million years ago at the beginning of the Ice Age, also referred to as the Pleistocene. Were there several specialized «Homo» species in Africa at the time, at least one of which was able to spread outside of Africa too? Or was there just one single species that was able to cope with a variety of ecosystems? Although the early Homo finds in Africa demonstrate large variation, it has not been possible to decide on answers to these questions in the past. One reason for this relates to the fossils available, as Christoph Zollikofer, anthropologist at the University of Zurich, explains: "Most of these fossils represent single fragmentary finds from multiple points in space and geological time of at least 500,000 years. This ultimately makes it difficult to recognize variation among species in the African fossils as opposed to variation within species."

Face of Dmanisi skull 5.

As many species as there are researchers

Marcia Ponce de León, who is also an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, points out another reason: paleoanthropologists often tacitly assumed that the fossil they had just found was representative for the species, i.e. that it aptly demonstrated the characteristics of the species. Statistically this is not very likely, she says, but nevertheless there were researchers who proposed up to five contemporary species of early Homo in Africa, including Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus. Ponce de León sums up the problem as follows: "At present there are as many subdivisions between species as there are researchers examining this problem."

Tracking development of «Homo erectus» over one million years thanks to a change in perspective
Dmanisi now offers the key to the solution. According to Zollikofer, the reason why Skull 5 is so important is that it unites features that have been used previously as an argument for defining different African "species". In other words: "Had the braincase and the face of the Dmanisi sample been found as separate fossils, they very probably would have been attributed to two different species." Ponce de León adds: "It is also decisive that we have five well-preserved individuals in Dmanisi whom we know to have lived in the same place and at the same time." These unique circumstances of the find make it possible to compare variation in Dmanisi with variation in modern human and chimpanzee populations. Zollikofer summarizes the result of the statistical analyses as follows: "Firstly, the Dmanisi individuals all belong to a population of a single early Homo species. Secondly, the five Dmanisi individuals are conspicuously different from each other, but not more different than any five modern human individuals, or five chimpanzee individuals from a given population."

More Unique skull find rebuts theories on species diversity in early humans

 

[waltky]

Granny says mebbe dat explains Uncle Ferd...

Modern humans more Neanderthal than once thought, studies suggest
29 Jan.`14 - It's getting harder and harder to take umbrage if someone calls you a Neanderthal.

According to two studies published on Wednesday, DNA from these pre-modern humans may play a role in the appearance of hair and skin as well as the risk of certain diseases. Although Neanderthals became extinct 28,000 years ago in Europe, as much as one-fifth of their DNA has survived in human genomes due to interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago, one of the studies found, although any one individual has only about 2 percent of caveman DNA.

"The 2 percent of your Neanderthal DNA might be different than my 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA, and it's found at different places in the genome," said geneticist Joshua Akey, who led one of the studies. Put it all together in a study of hundreds of people, and "you can recover a substantial proportion of the Neanderthal genome." Both studies confirmed earlier findings that the genomes of east Asians harbor more Neanderthal DNA than those of Europeans. This could be 21 percent more, according to an analysis by Akey and Benjamin Vernot, published online in the journal Science. Still, "more" is a relative term.

According to the paper by geneticists at Harvard Medical School, published in Nature, about 1.4 percent of the genomes of Han Chinese in Beijing and south China, as well as Japanese in Tokyo come from Neanderthals, compared to 1.1 percent of the genomes of Europeans. Anthropologists expressed caution about the findings.

Fewer than half a dozen Neanderthal fossils have yielded genetic material, said Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, one of the world's leading experts on early humans. Using this small sample to infer how much Neanderthal DNA persists in today's genome is therefore questionable, he said.

INTERBREEDING

 

[oldfart]

Modern humans more Neanderthal than once thought, studies suggest
29 Jan.`14 - It's getting harder and harder to take umbrage if someone calls you a Neanderthal.

According to two studies published on Wednesday, DNA from these pre-modern humans may play a role in the appearance of hair and skin as well as the risk of certain diseases. Although Neanderthals became extinct 28,000 years ago in Europe, as much as one-fifth of their DNA has survived in human genomes due to interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago, one of the studies found, although any one individual has only about 2 percent of caveman DNA.

Fascinating stuff, well deserving a bump!

There is a body of thought that about 40kyo there was a "brain revolution" that enabled representational art and abstract thinking. None of this is based on any physical evidence such as brain size or tool-making ability; it rests mainly on the appearance of cave art. To me this seems like special pleading; we assign this change to the time of the earliest manifestation. If we find something older, we move the date of the revolution back.

 

[jwoodie]

The 6000 year old earther's will just claim the measuring process is flawed.

Why don't you drop the straw man argument and contribute something useful?

 

[waltky]

DNA Shows Native Americans Emigrated From Asia...

Ancient DNA Ties Native Americans From Two Continents To Clovis
February 13, 2014 ~ The mysterious Clovis culture, which appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, appears to be the forerunner of Native Americans throughout the Americas, according to a study in Nature. Scientists have read the genetic sequence of a baby from a Clovis burial site in Montana to help fill out the story of the earliest Americans.

Until now, archaeologists have had to rely mainly on tools made of stone and bone, and other artifacts to tell the story of human migration about 15,000 years ago to the New World. Now that story is bolstered with some dramatic, ancient DNA, extracted from the remains of a 1-year-old boy who died in what is now Montana more than 12,000 years ago. That's the only human skeleton known from a brief but prolific culture in the Americas called Clovis. "Clovis is what we like to refer to as an 'archaeological complex,' " says Michael Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University. That complex is defined by characteristic tools, he says.

The Clovis artifacts were common for about 400 years, starting about 13,000 years ago. But at this point, there is only one set of human remains associated with those sorts of tools: that of the baby from Montana. "So this genetic study actually provides us with a look at who these people were," Waters says. The most obvious conclusion from the study is that the Clovis people who lived on the Anzick site in Montana were genetically very much like Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere. "The Anzick family is directly ancestral to so many peoples in the Americas," says Eske Willerslev, from the University of Copenhagen. "That's astonishing!"

Until recently, finding characteristic stone and bone tools was the only way to trace the fate of the Clovis people, whose culture appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago.

He led the effort to read that genome. The genes reveal that early Americans are the product of two lineages that most likely met and interbred in Asia before making the trek across the Bering land bridge. "So this strongly suggests that there was a single migration of people into the Americas," Waters says. "And these people were probably the people who eventually gave rise to Clovis." The finding contradicts a long-shot hypothesis that Clovis' ancestors actually came from Europe, not Asia. But it leaves many other questions about Clovis unresolved.

The artifacts from this culture are found from Washington state to Florida and many places in between. But the culture also disappeared suddenly, around 12,600 years ago. Waters doesn't find all of that so mysterious. "People change all the time and cultures change all the time and technologies change," Waters says. "And they change because people are adapting to new environments and changes in climate." "And at the end of the Clovis time period, 12,600 years ago, when this child was buried, the climate was changing. It was the beginning of the Younger Dryas cold snap. This is when you start seeing a lot of cultural differentiation taking place," Waters says.

MORE

 

[Gracie]

I always figured NA's and Asians were related.

 

[Agit8r]

My guess is that the aesthetics of cultures that are prone to theorize about "racial purity" have been shaped by ancient shame felt regarding the tundra fever that went on, and are in fact the result of attempts to hide its evidence.

 

[editec]

At this stage of human development I am much more interested in humanity's final destination than its original starting point.

 

[waltky]

Mebbe is why some got flat noses...

Fistfights Drove Human Face Evolution, Utah Researchers Suggest
June 09, 2014 WASHINGTON — The human face evolved so that it could take a punch, researchers suggest in a new study.

It's a much more violent explanation than the leading alternative, that our skulls changed to accommodate a diet of hard-to-chew foods. And the authors said it suggests a pugilistic past where violence was key to our evolution. When people fight, they go for the face, said study co-author Mike Morgan. Morgan knows a little something about fights. He is a black belt in two martial arts and is training as an emergency medicine physician at the University of Utah. "It gives me first-hand experience with a lot of the end results of human violence and aggression," he said.

Fist fighters battle during the Musangwe, an age old tradition where men and boys display their fighting skills, at Gaba Village in Limpopo province, South Africa.

Strong jaw

In the new study in the journal Biological Reviews, Morgan and his University of Utah co-author, David Carrier, noted that over the past 4 million years, our hominid ancestors evolved thicker and less protruding jaws, stronger jaw muscles and teeth, and a reinforced bone under the eye socket -- all areas that take a beating in a fight. Last year, the authors published a paper detailing how the fist evolved over that time to be a better fighting weapon. Only humans fight with fists. Dogs bite. Cats scratch. Antelopes gore. Our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, can't form fists. They slap. Morgan said a punch hurts more than a slap because it delivers force to a smaller area. "If you have a better weapon, you can theoretically win more mates," which means more chances to pass on your genes, which is what evolution is all about, he said.

Better defenses

And as the weapon got better, Morgan's research proposed, so did the defense. "As we developed this ability to form a fist, we see an equal development in the robusticity and strength of the most commonly struck portions of the face," Morgan said. All this suggests an extremely violent human evolutionary history. "At one point in time, it made sense for us to be aggressive and violent," Morgan said. "It guaranteed the survival of our species." Brains may have won out over brawn in the evolution of the modern human species. The researchers note that our skulls are weaker in some of the same key areas compared to earlier ancestral species - changes that coincide with a decline in upper-body strength and a less powerful punch.

University of Utah researchers contend that human faces evolved to minimize injury from punches to the face during fights between males. Top to bottom: chimpanzee, our closest primate relative; hominid ancestors Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus; and modern human.

Skeptics

However, the fist-evolution study did not convince critics, who noted that fists are good for gripping tools and other uses besides fighting. Morgan expects a vigorous debate over his latest study, too. "This is certainly a creative new idea," said George Washington University anthropologist Brian Richmond, "but there is abundant evidence to support the hypothesis that changes in diet and food processing best explain the decrease in the size of the face during human evolution." Morgan promised the fight over the competing theories will end peacefully.

Fistfights Drove Human Face Evolution, Utah Researchers Suggest

 

[S.J.]

Wow, 340,000 years old! We're lucky if we make it to 80 these days.

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd wants to find him a fine Scottish lass...

Genetic history of modern Europeans a tangled tale, research finds
17 Sept.`14: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The genetic origins of modern Europeans may be more complicated than previously thought.

Ancient people from Siberia who were related to the first humans to enter the Americas during the Ice Age also mingled with prehistoric populations in Europe and left their mark on the DNA of today's Europeans, scientists said on Wednesday. Their study, published in the journal Nature, is the latest to use sophisticated genetic research to clarify the ancestry of modern populations. Experts had thought today's Europeans descended from two other groups of people. The first were primitive hunter-gatherers from western Europe who had lived on the continent since it was first colonized by our species more than 40,000 years ago. The second were farmers who migrated into Europe from a region spanning parts of Syria, Turkey and Iraq around 7,000 years ago.

The new study revealed the role of hunter-gatherers from the Siberian region who the scientists called "ancient north Eurasians." The scientists sequenced the genomes of a farmer who had lived in Germany about 7,000 years ago and eight hunter-gatherers who had lived in Luxembourg and Sweden about 8,000 years ago. They then compared those findings with the genomes of 2,345 people living today to decipher European ancestry. "Our study does indeed show that European origins were more complex than previously imagined," said Iosif Lazaridis, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School. "It seems that Europeans - who are often considered one group today - actually have a complex history with at least three groups admixing in different proportions in their history," Lazaridis added.

Almost all Europeans were found to have ancestry from all three of those ancient groups. The ancient north Eurasians contributed up to 20 percent of the genetics of Europeans, although this was the smallest proportion among the three ancestral groups. People in northern Europe, especially the Baltic states, have the highest proportion of western European hunter-gatherer ancestry, with up to 50 percent of the DNA of Lithuanians coming from this group. Southern Europeans had more of their genetic ancestry from the ancient farmers, with up to 90 percent of the DNA of Sardinians tracing back to these early European immigrants.

These farmers who came from the Near East brought new capabilities to Europe, domesticating animals including pigs and cows, growing crops including types of wheat, barley, peas and lentils and using obsidian sickles for harvest. Another of the researchers, Johannes Krause, a geneticist at the University of Tübingen and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for History and the Sciences in Germany, said the ancient north Eurasians "connect all modern Europeans and Native Americans." The findings show they not only mixed with prehistoric Europeans but also were related to the people who trekked more than 15,000 years ago across the frozen land bridge that once linked Siberia to Alaska and spread into the Americas.

Genetic history of modern Europeans a tangled tale research finds - Yahoo News