50,000 year old woman's toe reveals Neanderthals had sex with everyone

[lafinjack]

According to an international team of anthropologists and geneticists at the University of California, Berkeley, our ancient Neanderthal cousins were a randy and apparently not very picky conglomerate of sexual deviants. Thanks to their remarkable research, in which DNA was extracted from a 50,000-year-old woman's toe, the team at Berkeley

Comments

[ebay313]

I find this stuff fascinating. It's interesting trying to imagine what life was like for these species at that time.

[gambitia]

I always try to imagine what humans used to be like. Human evolution is so fascinating.

I remember reading a book on human evolution, and it had a section on how light skin came to be in Europe and Asia. According to this book, light skin was so highly advantageous* in Europe (it wasn't clear in the book whether they were still talking about Asia and Europe or just Europe) that it spread quickly enough so a long-lived person would have seen their village or whatever go from mostly-dark-skinned to mostly-light-skinned. Like, their children would have been a bit lighter, and their grandchildren even lighter, and their great-grandchildren lighter still. What would that have been like, having some massive appearance shift and having no understanding of why it was happening? Would people have even noticed? Would they have cared? Would they think that they had some illness? Would they think their God was smiting them? Or blessing them?

[mollywobbles867]

I love science. I heard about this on NPR the other day. So cool!

[mahsox_mahsox]

Well, that supports the multiregional hypothesis for the origin of modern humans. Well, at least to the extent that it resembles Weidenreich's original diagrams.

[martyfan]

A+ use of the "drill baby drill" tag.

[corbyinoz]

This is just endlessly fascinating to me. And such a slap in the face to every racist, anywhere, anytime.