Neanderthal

I’ve been fascinated by the genetic research into the presence of Neanderthal genes in modern humans over the past few years. Neanderthals are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago.

Recent inventions and improvements in technology have allowed the sequencing of the first Neanderthal genome and enabled comparisons with those of modern humans.

Approximately 20 percent of Neanderthal DNA survives in modern humans; however, a single human has an average of around 2% Neanderthal DNA overall with some countries and backgrounds having a maximum of 3% per human.

“Surprise! 20 Percent of Neanderthal Genome Lives On in Modern Humans, Scientists Find”. National Geographic. 29 January 2014.

Neanderthals are not truly extinct, part of them lives on within us.

I found the reporting of the links between humans and Neanderthals to be deeply racist in its assumptions. Europeans and Asians have more Neanderthal genes than people from Africa south of the Sahara. One of the first assumptions, which was disproved, was that genes for increased brain size might have come from Neanderthals. It’s odd that the reporting wasn’t that Europeans and Asians are sub-human, after widespread inbreeding with another species of animal, and that sub-Saharan Africans are the only pure-bred anatomically modern humans (AMH).

There’s also a strange inability to understand human behaviour in the science. Take this piece of research:

“2016 research indicates some Neanderthal males might not have viable male offspring with some AMH females. This could explain the reason why no modern man has a Neanderthal Y chromosome.”

 Mendez, Fernando L.; et al. (April 7, 2016). “The Divergence of Neanderthal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes”. The American Journal of Human Genetics. 98 (4): 728–34. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2016.02.023. PMC 4833433. PMID 27058445.

No modern man has a Neanderthal Y chromosome? It’s obvious to me why that is. Modern men raped Neanderthal women and/or kept them as sex slaves. Neanderthals raised the subsequent children. Neanderthal males, however, didn’t rape modern women, or if they did, then the children were all killed.

The lack of a Neanderthal Y chromosome in modern men is more likely to be because humans waged war, used rape as a weapon of war, kept sex slaves, and killed any children the women bore from Neanderthal fathers.

Isn’t that a much more likely explanation than anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals formed loving paired relationships and sadly could never have boys, and only give birth to girls?

Using rape as a weapon of war is something anatomically modern humans have continued to do.