World View Overturned Alert! Again!

Jul 31, 2008 12:16

Unusually, television seems to have overtaken the web in reporting results from the Neanderthal Genome Project, which revolutionise my view of the world, again. See Sex and the Neanderthals if it's still around for download when you read this.

To recap:

Back in the classical age of paleo-genetics, before 2003, we tracked the expansion of modern humans from Africa using Y chromosomes and mitochondria, both relatively easy as they're passed on by cloning from father to son and from mother to child respectively. The picture was simple, a complete replacement of all other humanoids about 80,000 years ago, with everyone now alive as cousins on all sides no more than 4000 times removed. Unfortunately these techniques are both a bit naive, in following just the paternal and maternal lines like patriarchal surnames through father's father's father and mother's mother's mother, ignoring the other 99% of the genome and almost all of our ancestors.

Then it got fuzzier with haplotype tracking, tracing somewhat random chunks of DNA which happen to have been passed on in sets just because of their physical layout on the double spiral (see earlier post for that trauma). It was horrid from the point of view of providing some theoretical support for racism, but could be mostly ignored as a minor or cosmetic effect, just giving modern populations a small amount of local adaptations from earlier species (Neanderthal in Europe, Erectus in Asia etc.)

But now that a Neanderthal bone (just one) has been found with enough DNA to sequence it, something completely astonishing has appeared. It not only contains the modern human gene FOXP2, the loosely categorised "language gene" (see earlier post now overtaken by events), but seems to place the origin of that gene, which defines us, in the Neanderthals.

Amongst other problems, this clashes with the dates for modern human expansion in a scary way. In particular, we arrive in Australia 60,000 years ago (following the easy coastal route from Africa when sea level was lower), then in Europe 40,000 years ago (on the more difficult overland route), then absorb FOXP2 from the stocky cousins. It then has to race over to upgrade the Australians completely, in a time when they had appeared to be isolated from the outside world. Perhaps they gained language so recently that the Dreamtime mythos really does date from a non-speaking folk memory (which I'd thought was just my fantasy).

The dates for the Paleolithic Revolution in Africa also collapse, if that explosion of symbolic thought was really set off by the birth of true language and that was in turn set off by assimilating the Neanderthal FOXP2 mutation far away and chronologically later.

And the question of why the Neanderthals themselves didn't get the Symbolic Revolution first pops up, though they do now seem to have had make-up and ritual burial, so would perhaps have made it to the internet independently by now if they hadn't been absorbed into us.

Perhaps their brains being larger than ours is more significant than we thought as well.

This is the kind of discovery and massive reinterpretation from one fossil which is prone to disappearing just as suddenly with the next finding (especially if it's that there is modern human genetic contamination in The One Bone). But if true it recasts the role of modern Sapiens not as exterminators of all other humanoids, but as a transport layer of genetic traders, expanding over the world and collecting key genes from other species, which they then spread into everyone now alive.

I like that one better than the Original Sin of Cain.

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