HEALTH ISSUE: Human Where they lived Together For 50,000 years

There's a bit of Neanderthal in all of us

Human & cave Men Likely To Have Interbred In Mideast, Where They Lived Together For 50,000 Years

Washington:  We have met Neanderthal and he is us -- at least a little. The most detailed look yet at the Neanderthal genome helps answer one of the most debated questions in anthropology: Did Neanderthals and modern humans mate?

       The answer is yes, there is at least some cave man hiology in most of us. Between 1% and 4% of genes in people from Europe and Asia trace back to Neanderthals. "They live on, a little bit," says Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig.

        Researchers led by Paabo, Richard Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School compared the genetic material collected from the bones of three Neanderthals with that from five modern humans.

       Their findings, reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science, show a relationship between Neanderthals and modern people outside Africa, Paabo said.

       "People are interested in the question: By what route did I get here?" And the idea that there is a faint echo of Neanderthals" is interesting, said Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural history.

       Humans trace their origins out of Africa into the Middle East and then on to other parts of the world. The genetic relationship with Neanderthals was found in people from Europe, China and Papua-New Guinea, but not people from Africa.

        Paabo agreed his finding does not mean that only people from outside Africa have some cave man biology. With more study it might be found in some Africans also. The closest extinct relative to modern people, Neanderthals existed from about 400,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago. They coexisted with modern humans for 30,000 to 50,000 years in Europe and western Asia.

        While many people think of Neanderthals as very primitive, archaeologists have found they had tools for things like hunting and sewing, controlled fire, lived in shelters and buried their dead. 

        Asked if the findings show differences between Africans and non-Africans, Paabo replied that people who want to present data in some sort of racist perspective would find a way to do so. He said, one way to look at this data could be to say people outside Africa are more primitive, while another way could be to say there is something beneficial about being part Neanderthal. "There is no basis to link this to some sort of advantage of one group over another," he said.