- Aug 5, 2016
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Yeah, I confused Homo Erectus with some missing link.Homo sapiens and Homo heidelbergensis both evolved from Homo Erectus, the former in Africa the latter in Europe. There weren't particulary many subspecies available at a specific point in time, and they were partially geographically separated. Finding Homo erectus DNA isn't that surprising, because it's our predecessor, but they didn't interbred at this critical point in time, because Homo erectus was already extinct 70.000 years ago. The youngest fossils we found from H. erectus are around 110.000 years old. Homo sapiens evolved from H. erectus around 300.000 years ago and H. neanderthalensis from H. heidelbergensis around 200.000 years ago. so while it's true that the early H. Sapiens had the opportunity to mate with late H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis, 70.000 years ago they were indeed in a tough spot.
At this time they barely made it out of africa, yet to discover the H. floresiensis on Java or the H. denisova in southern siberia.
So the only available sub-species mating partners for this small population were the neanderthals at that time.
It's not unreasonable to assume, that the neanderthals may have saved our ass as a species. However, their contribution still seems to be minor, the largest percentage of neanderthal genome seems to be around 4% found in some Eurasians and Northafricans.
on a side note: "Africans" are not a human sub-species.
Yes, as far as we know. But could be. Anyway the more important thing is, that for like 90% of all defective genetic expressions you don't need a state of the art genome lab. Untreated hereditary diseases or birth defects often lead to an early death anyway, and/or are easily spotted, like trisomy 21 or spina bifida (split spine). The beauty of a cult whose job it is to birth and raise children is, that they can handle cases which express their deficiency at a later age still accordingly, and no one will know.
Just leave this kid to bleed out after you ritually carved a small symbol of the godess somewhere, if they have hemophilia, etc.
Which is normally and in general true, if you have other mating partners available. Not so much if you're the only family clan in the whole area. Because you surely go extinct if you refuse to breed close family members, in favour to meet someone outside the clan in a distant future, when your life expectancy is around 25-30 years.
I dare to say (if the bottleneck theory is true) that inbreeding definetly didn't increase our genetic healthiness, but may as well as the occasional neanderthal helped our species to survive, which is the opposite of extinction.
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About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn't know existed.
Our own species — Homo sapiens — lived alongside other groups that split off from the same genetic family tree at different times. And there's plenty of evidence from other parts of the world that early humans had sex with other hominins, like Neanderthals.