{"id":1696,"date":"2006-11-18T00:16:04","date_gmt":"2006-11-18T00:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1696"},"modified":"2012-02-19T22:18:07","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T22:18:07","slug":"a-short-course-in-neanderthal-genetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1696","title":{"rendered":"A short course in Neanderthal genetics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I&#8217;m handling a 350,000-year-old hand-axe at the British Museum, which was made by one of the ancestors of the Neanderthals, a <i>Homo heidelbergensis<\/i> (or if you prefer an early Neanderthal &#8211; not all the experts use that terminology), two questions (possibly inter-related) come up: did we kill them off? did we interbreed with them? <\/p>\n<p>Having just read John Hawks excellent <a href = \"http:\/\/johnhawks.net\/weblog\/reviews\/genomics\/neandertal\/neandertal_genomics_faq_2006.html\">Neanderthal genome FAQ<\/a> I&#8217;m going to have to amend my answer to the second question. (Which was: &#8220;the current evidence says we didn&#8217;t&#8221;. It will now be &#8220;there&#8217;s some limited, early evidence that we might have done.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>I was using the mitochondrial DNA evidence outlined <a href = \"http:\/\/www.seedmagazine.com\/news\/2006\/11\/post_4.php?page=all&#038;p=y\">here<\/a>, but seems that isn&#8217;t now thought to be enough &#8211; because mitochondrial DNA is only a small part of the story. <\/p>\n<p>That second link also has a simpler outline of the debate, if you&#8217;re finding John Hawks hard going&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I&#8217;m handling a 350,000-year-old hand-axe at the British Museum, which was made by one of the ancestors of the Neanderthals, a Homo heidelbergensis (or if you prefer an early Neanderthal &#8211; not all the experts use that terminology), two questions (possibly inter-related) come up: did we kill them off? did we interbreed with them? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1696"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3547,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions\/3547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}