The Neanderthal Legacy by Paul Mellars

[Guardian]

Also in terms of legends of the "Watchers" of the Book of Enoch. Mainly, I'm just looking to see if anything falls into place on its own.

 

[shijing]

Also in terms of legends of the "Watchers" of the Book of Enoch. Mainly, I'm just looking to see if anything falls into place on its own.

I don't get the joke?...

 

[Guardian]

Also in terms of legends of the "Watchers" of the Book of Enoch. Mainly, I'm just looking to see if anything falls into place on its own.

I don't get the joke?...

Using the phrase "see if anything falls into place on its own" when referring to the "Watchers" and the Book of Enoch struck me as VERY funny. The great angelic "fall from grace" and all that...

Edited to add: Then again, maybe I just have a very warped sense of humor...sorry for the noise.

 

[shijing]

Also in terms of legends of the "Watchers" of the Book of Enoch. Mainly, I'm just looking to see if anything falls into place on its own.

I don't get the joke?...

Using the phrase "see if anything falls into place on its own" when referring to the "Watchers" and the Book of Enoch struck me as VERY funny. The great angelic "fall from grace" and all that...

Edited to add: Then again, maybe I just have a very warped sense of humor...sorry for the noise.

No worries -- never read the Book of Enoch, so I think I was just lacking context. Thanks for explaining :)

 

[Guardian]

No worries -- never read the Book of Enoch,

Ya haven't missed much...basically a couple hundred "angels" make whoopie with human women and it all goes downhill from there.

It kinda sounded to me like someone's crew went AWOL, and their Captain got seriously ticked off when he found out .....almost an old Jewish version of "Mutiny on the Bounty"

 

[dant]

Guardian:

Heh! To say the LEAST about the book of Enoch!

I also liked your idea of the "joke" but it could
have been funnier said if it were written as:

"Mainly, I'm just watching to see if anything falls into place on its own."

Then I would have done a double-look and laughed!

But no, Laura got it right the first time! ;)

 

[Guardian]

But no, Laura got it right the first time! ;)

I can't quite tell if she was being intentionally punny or not?

 

[Laura]

But no, Laura got it right the first time! ;)

I can't quite tell if she was being intentionally punny or not?

Actually, I wasn't. I was so concentrated on my thinking, multi-tasking too, that I just wrote what was in my head at the instant. When thinking of the Watchers and the Book of Enoch, there are a number of things that come to the fore in my head. One is that the book is actually dated to around the 2nd century BC which puts it in the time of the Maccabees when a bunch of schizoids were busy creating a fake history and nationality for the Jews. That's pretty much when the OT as we know it was composed/assembled/edited/manipulated, etc, so we can suppose the same to be true of the Book of Enoch.

There is also some evidence that the Book of Enoch actually is a tale from a Northern European source because the astronomical material in there only fits those latitudes.

There is one theory out there by a pair of researchers who did a fresh translation, that it was originally something like a captain's log of a group that survived a world killing catastrophe and was later transmogrified and glossed.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that the Epic of Gilgamesh is also of Northern European origin. I've already noted that many of the stories in the Bible seem to me to be re-worked Greek myths, such as the David/Goliath thing being a re-make of Perseus and Medusa. So many people just believe that nonsense that the Bible - the Jews - have the oldest deal, from God's mouth to Adam's (a Jew, naturally) ear and all that when the actual evidence is that there is very little in the Bible that they didn't steal from some other group of people. Heck, they even stole the whole Jesus thing. The guy probably (high probability) wasn't even a Jew.

So, when the Watchers/sons of God/daughters of men thing was mentioned, it had been on my mind for days and all of the above, and even more, was suddenly at the forefront in my mind with the processors shuffling through the data looking for something to "drop into the slot." So I wrote "fall into place." No pun intended.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

The mtDNA shows no mixing, but the nuclear dna shows mixing and the figure is between 1 and 4 percent, which just happens to be the same figure given for essential psychopathy by Lobaczewski and others.

I've got a question about this. The quoted article says that: "Supporting that conclusion is the fact that the Neanderthal DNA more closely matched that of the China, France and Papua New Guinea individuals in their study. All had the one to four percent Neanderthal contribution to their DNA..." Isn't that different than saying 1-4% of humans have that DNA, which is apparently the case with psychopathy?

 

[Guardian]

There is one theory out there by a pair of researchers who did a fresh translation, that it was originally something like a captain's log of a group that survived a world killing catastrophe and was later transmogrified and glossed.

Interesting...I'd like to read that. The BoE always sounded like a classic "sailors run amok on shore" story to me.

So I wrote "fall into place." No pun intended.

Made me laugh :)

 

[Laura]

The mtDNA shows no mixing, but the nuclear dna shows mixing and the figure is between 1 and 4 percent, which just happens to be the same figure given for essential psychopathy by Lobaczewski and others.

I've got a question about this. The quoted article says that: "Supporting that conclusion is the fact that the Neanderthal DNA more closely matched that of the China, France and Papua New Guinea individuals in their study. All had the one to four percent Neanderthal contribution to their DNA..." Isn't that different than saying 1-4% of humans have that DNA, which is apparently the case with psychopathy?

Exactly. The whole paper is problematical, but I'm not an expert, just good at "blinking" such things. I can't tell you WHAT, exactly, is wrong, I can just tell you that something is seriously wrong with this paper and it's claim that anatomically modern humans (some of them) interbred with Neanderthals.

 

[RyanX]

If anybody wants a copy of this impossible to get book, I have a scan of it.

I'd be interested in a copy too. At your convenience, of course. :)

 

[Laura]

I've now re-read this DNA paper over several more times and I really don't think this is our "smoking gun" for any cross between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.

There's a lot of jargon to get around, and some of it seems to be almost deliberately obtuse, but the general thrust of the whole thing is that it is a strong counter to the "out of Africa" theory. Let me include a few quotes from the paper itself:

The morphological features typical of Neandertals first appear in the European fossil record about 400,000 years ago. Progressively more distinctive Neandertal forms subsequently evolved until Neandertals disappeared from the fossil record about 30,000 years ago. During the later part of their history, Neandertals lived in Europe and Western Asia as far east as Southern Siberia and as far south as the Middle East. During that time, Neandertals presumably came into contact with anatomically modern humans in the Middle East from at least 80,000 years ago, and subsequently in Europe and Asia.

Neandertals are the sister group of all present day humans. Thus, comparisons of the human genome to the genomes of Neandertals and apes allow features that set fully anatomically modern humans apart from other hominin forms... In particular, a Neandertal genome sequence provides a catalog of changes that have become fixed or have risen to high frequency in modern humans during the last few hundred thousand years... since humans diverged from Neandertals. ...

The only part of the genome that has been examined from multiple Neandertals, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome, consistently falls outside the variation found in present-day humans and thus provides no evidence for interbreeding. ... In contrast, the nuclear genome is composed of tens of thousands of recombining, and hence independently evolving, DNA segments that provide an opportunity to obtain a clearer picture of the relationship between Neandertals and present-day humans.

A challenge in detecting signals of gene flow between Neandertals and modern human ancestors is that the two groups share common ancestors within the last 500,000 years which is no deeper than the nuclear DNA sequence variation within present-day humans. Thus, even if no gene flow occurred, in many segments of the genome, Neandertals are expected to be more closely related to some present-day humans than they are to each other. However, if Neandertals are, on average across many independent regions of the genome, more closely related to present-day humans in certain parts of the world than in others, they would strongly suggest that Neandertals exchanged parts of their genome with the ancestors of these groups.

So that is how they set up their assumptions and made their experimental prediction. Obviously, this was written after all the work was done, so it was written to conform to the accepted "out of Africa" paradigm.

They had bits of DNA from three different Neandertal individuals. They show the three bones, but four sites from which samples were obtained. Apparently, not all bones were suitable. So, they ended up using three bones from a single site - Vindija Cave in Croatia. I think that a lot of people might think that they actually had bones from the widely separated sites in the assay, but that is not the case. All from one place. They tested to make sure that the three bones were, indeed, from different individuals and they were, though two of them were from maternally related individuals. But they dealt with this in a clever way as you will see below:

Assuming an average DNA divergence of 6.5 million years between the human and chimpanzee genomes this results in a point estimate for the average divergence of Neandertal and modern human autosomal DNA sequences of 825,000 years We caution that this is only a rough estimate because of the uncertainty about the time of divergence of humans and chimpanzees. ...

To put the divergence of the Neandertal genome sequences from Vindija Cave into perspective with regard to other Neandertals, we generated a much smaller amount of DNA sequence data from three Neandertal bones from three additional sites that cover much of the geographical range of later Neandertals: El Sidron in Asturias, Span, dated to ~49,000 years BP; Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley, Germany, from which we sequenced the type specimen found in 1856 dated to ~42,000 YBP; and Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucasus, Russia, dated to 60,000 to 70,000 YBP. DNA divergences estimated for each of these specimens to the human reference genome show that none of them differ significantly from the Vindija individuals, although these estimates are relatively uncertain due to the limited amount of DNA sequence data. It is noteworthy that the Mezmaiskaya specimen, which is 20,000 to 30,000 years older than the other Neandertals analyzed and comes from the easternmost location, does not differ in divergence from the other individuals. Thus within the resolution of our current data, Neandertals from across a great part of their range in western Eurasia are equally related to present-day humans.

So they generated a small bit of DNA from the other specimens and compared that little bit to the same area on the genome of the main specimens and concluded that they were all the same. They note "these estimates are relatively uncertain due to the limited amount of DNA sequence data" but then confidently assert that Neandertals across the board are equally related to present-day humans. I'll skip all the technical stuff because it is so jargon-y that it's almost comprehensible and you'd have to be at least a semi-expert to understand it fully.

A long-standing question is when the ancestral populations of Neandertals and modern humans diverged. Population divergence, defined as the time point when two populations last exchanged genes, is more recent than the DNA sequence divergence because the latter is the sum of the time to population divergence plus the average time to the common ancestors of DNA sequences within the ancestral population. The divergence time of two populations can be inferred from the frequency with which derived alleles of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) discovered in one population are seen in the other population. The reason for this is that the older the population divergence, the more likely it is that derived alleles discovered in one population are due to novel mutations in that population. ... {skip numbers, percentages, etc} ... this suggests that Neandertals and present-day human populations separated between 270,000 and 440,000 years ago, a date that is compatible with some interpretations of the paleontological and archaeological record.

To test whether Neandertals are more closely related to some present-day humans than to others, we identified SNPs by comparing one randomly chosen sequence from each of two present-day humans and asking if the Neandertals match the alleles of the two individuals equally often. If gene flow between Neandertals and modern humans ceased before differentiation between present-day human populations began, this is expected to be the case no matter which present-day humans are compared. The prediction of this null hypothesis of no gene flow holds regardless of population expansions, bottlenecks, or substructure that might have occurred in modern human history. The reason for this is that when single chromosomes are analyzed in the two present-day populations, differences in demographic histories in the two populations will not affect the results even if they may profoundly influence allele frequencies. Under the alternative model of later gene flow between Neandertals and modern humans, we expect Neandertals to match alleles in individuals from some parts of the world more often than the others.

We restricted this analysis to biallelic SNPs where two present-day humans carry different alleles and where the Neandertals carred the derived allele, i.e., not matching chimpanzee. ... We performed this test using eight present-day humans: two European Americans, two East Asians, and four West Africans, for whom sequences have been generated... We find that the Neandertals are qually close to Europeans and East Asians.... However, the Neandertals are significantly closer to non-Africans than to Africans.

The greater genetic proximity of Neandertals to Europeans and Asians than to Africans is seen no matter how we subdivide the data...

A potential artifact that might explain these observations is contamination of the Neandertal sequences wit non-AFrican DNA...{then they explain how it can't be contaminated and here's why} ...

To analyze the relationship of the Neanderals to a more diverse set of modern humans, we repeated the analysis above using the genome sequences of the French, Han, Papuan, Yoruba, and San individuals that we generated. Strikingly, no comparison within Eurasia or within Africa shows significant skews... However, all comparisons of non-Africans and Africans show that the Neandertal is closer to the non-African

Thus, analyses of present-day humans consistently show that Neandertals share significantly more derived alleles with non-Africans than with Africans, whereas they share equal amounts of derived alleles when compared either to individuals within Eurasia or to individuals within Africa.

A parsimonious explanation for these observations is that Neandertals exchanged genes with the ancestors of non-Africans.

Actually, an equally "parsimonious" explanation for all of this is that the "out of Africa" model no longer flies.

They then point out that all, or almost all of the gene flow is from Neandertal to Modern humans, and none the other way around.

An alternative approach to detect gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans is to focus on patterns of variation in present-day humans - blinded to information from the Neandertal genome - in order to identify regions that are the strongest candidates for being derived from Neandertals. If these candidate regions match the Neandertals at a higher rate than is expected by chance, this provides additional evidence for gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans. We used 1,263,750 Perlegen Class A SNPs, identified in individuals of diverse ancesty and found 13 candidate regions of Neandertal ancestry. A prediction of Neandertal-to-modern human gene flow is that DNA sequences that entered the human gene pool from Neandertals will tend to match Neandertal more often than their frequency in the present-day human population. To test this prediction, we identified 166 "tag SNPs" that separate 12 of the haplotype clades in non-Africans (OOA) from the cosmopolitan haplotype clades shared between Africans and non-Africans (COS)and for which we had data from the Neandertals. Overall, the Neandertals match the deep clade unique to non-Africans at 133 of the 166 tag SNPs, and 10 of the 12 regions where tag SNPs occur show an excess of OOA over COS sites. Given that the OOA alleles occur at a frequency of much less than 50% in non-Africans (average of 13%, and all less than 30%), the fact that the candidate regions mattch the Neandertals in 10 of 12 cases suggests that they largely derive from Neandertals.

The analysis shows that some old haplotypes most likely owe their presence in present-day non-Africans to gene flow from Neandertals. However, not all old haplotypes in non-Africans may have such an origin. For example, it has been suggested that the H2 haplotype on chormosome 17 and the D haplotype of the microcephalin gene were contributed by Neandertals to present-day non-Africans. This is not supported by the current data because the Neandertals analyzed do not carry these haplotypes. [

Let's pause a moment to take a look at what has just been said. First, let's look at the H2 Haplotype that was formerly attributed to Neanderthal but is now proven to be from "elsewhere".

The tau H2 haplotype is almost exclusively Caucasian in origin

Abstract

We have assessed the distribution of the tau H1/H2 haplotype in the publicly available reference series of samples with representatives of most racial groups. This analysis shows that the H2 haplotype is probably exclusively Caucasian in origin and its marginal occurrence in other racial groups is likely to reflect admixture. We discuss this observation in terms of the origin of the H2 haplotype and the epidemiology of the tauopathies.

--------------------------------------

P2Y12 H2 Haplotype Is Associated With Peripheral Arterial Disease

H2 haplotype at chromosome 17q21.31 protects against childhood sexual abuse-associated risk for alcohol consumption and dependence

Association between Tau H2 Haplotype and Age at Onset in Frontotemporal Dementia

Etc. Obviously, it is an interesting gene. I scoped out a bunch of speculative articles about it and the general trend seems to show a connection with present-day autoimmune issues which we speculate relate to diet and toxic environment. The most interesting was the research showing that protective effects of this haplotype against inability to cope with abuse. Highly suggestive, I think.

Then, the next one:

A derived form of MCPH1 called haplogroup D appeared about 37,000 years ago (anytime between 14,000 and 60,000 years ago) and has spread to become the more common form throughout the world except Sub-Saharan Africa. The timing of its emergence may have closely preceded the Upper Paleolithic, when people started colonising Europe, although the margin of error is substantial[8] and there is evidence that the transition to the Upper Paleolithic occurred in Africa before spreading to Europe.[9] Doubts concerning origins aside, modern distributions of chromosomes bearing the ancestral forms of MCPH1 and MCPH5 coincide with the incidence of tonal languages, although the nature of this relationship can only be guessed at.[10]

Haplogroup D may have originated from a lineage separated from modern humans approximately 1.1 million years ago and later introgressed into humans. This finding supports the possibility of admixture between modern humans and extinct Homo spp.[11] While Neanderthals were suggested to be the possible source of this haplotype, it was not found in the individuals used to prepare the first draft of the Neanderthal genome.[12][13]

On the other hand the sample of 89 individuals with only nine Africans used in the study has been criticized as being inadequate for the conclusion the paper draws, and comparable studies demonstrate that undersampling specific areas of East/Central Africa may lead to unwarranted conclusions.[14] Additionally, scientists have not identified the evolutionary pressures that caused the supposed spread of these mutations.[15]

Controversy

Although Chinese himself, Bruce Lahn's public announcements that some brain-genes are more advanced on some continents than on others were conscripted by websites promoting white "racialism". An American White supremacist magazine embraced the research as "the moment the antiracists and egalitarians have dreaded." ...

Lahn's study began to attract considerable controversy in the science world. Richard Lewontin considers the two published papers as "egregious examples of going well beyond the data to try to make a splash." Lahn maintains that the science of his studies are sound, and freely admits that a direct link between these particular genes and either cognition or intelligence has not yet been conclusively established. Bruce Lahn is now engaging himself with other areas of study.

More discussion is skipped, then they say that the gene flow from Neandertals to humans occurred between 5,000 and 80,000 YBP.

One model for modern human origins suggests that all present-day humans trace all their ancestry back to a small African population that expanded and replaced archaic forms of humans without admixture. Our analysis of the Neandertal genome may not be compatible with this view because Neandertals are on average closer to individuals in Eurasia than to individuals in Africa. Furthermore, individuals in Eurasia today carry regions in their genome that are closely related to those in Neandertals and distant from other present-day humans. The data suggest that between 1 and 4% of the genomes of people in Eurasia are derived from Neandertals. Thus, while the Neandertal genome presents a challenge to the simplest version of an "out-of-Africa" model for modern human origins, it continues to support the view that the vast majority of genetic variants that exist at appreciable frequencies outside of Africa came from Africa with the spread of anatomically modern humans.

The above is an obvious conciliatory paragraph meant to calm the "out of Africa" mainstream, evolutionary view of things. The very fact that a whole bunch of people from Europeans to New Guineans could exhibit certain homogeneity as this paper demonstrates, and from such a relatively recent divergence, kind of makes mincemeat of the claim that the reason they think everyone came out of Africa is because there is so much genetic diversity there.

A striking observation is that Neandertals are as closely related to a Chinese and Papuan individual as to a French individual, even though morphologically recognizable Neandertals exist only in the fossil record of Europe and western Asia. Thus, the gene flow between Neandertals and modern humans that we detect most likely occurred before the divergence of Europeans, East Asians, and Papuans. This may be explained by mixing of early modern humans ancestral to present-day non-Africans with Neandertals in the Middle East before their expansion into Eurasia. Such a scenario is compatible with the archaeological record, which shows that modern humans appeared in the Middle East before 100,000 years ago whereas the Neandertals existed in the same region after this time, probably until 50,000 years ago.

It is important to note that although we detect a signal compatible with gene flow from Neandertals into ancestors of present-day humans outside Africa, this does not show that other forms of gene flow did not occur. For example, we detect gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans but no reciprocal gene flow from modern humans into Neandertals. ...

It may seem surprising that we see no evidence for greater gene flow from Neandertals to present-day Europeans than to present-day people in eastern Asia given that the morphology of some hominin fossils in Europe has been interpreted as evidence for gene flow from Neandertals into early modern humans late in Neandertal history. It is possible that later migrations into Europe, for example in connection with the spread of agriculture, have obscured the traces of such gene flow. ... It is also possible that if the expansion of modern humans occurred differently in Europe than in the Middle east, for example by already large populations interacting with Neandertals, then there may be little or no trace of any gene flow in present-day Europeans even if interbreeding occurred. Thus, the contingencies of demographic history may cause some events of past interbreeding to leave traces in present-day populations, whereas other events will leave little or no traces.

Although gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans when they first left sub-Saharan Africa seems to be the most parsimonious model compatible with the current data, other scenarios are also possible. Fore example, we cannot currently rule out a scenario in which the ancestral population of present-day non-Africans was more closely related to Neandertals than the ancestral population of present-day Africans due to ancient substructure within Africa. If after the divergence of Neandertals there was incomplete genetic homogenization between what were to become the ancestors of non-Africans and Africans, present-day non -Africans would be more closely related to Neandertals than are Africans. In fact, old population substructure in Africa has been suggested based on genetic as well as paleontological data.

Again, trying to calm down the out-of-Africa evolutionists. Notice that they mention the curious lack of homogenization within Africa which SHOULD have occurred if humanity evolved in Africa. That there is more homogeneity outside of Africa is still striking. It is often attributed to "bottle-necks" and short time-scale residence in an area: "they haven't been there long enough to diversify", but is that really the case? When any population of animals or plants is left to "go wild," there is rather rapid reversion to a singularly homogeneous state.

Anyway, that's the report on this paper along with a few thoughts I had along the way.

 

[Laura]

If anybody wants a copy of this impossible to get book, I have a scan of it.

I'd be interested in a copy too. At your convenience, of course. :)

Here's an online copy:
http://www.artificialcranialdeformation.info/Dingwall/index.htm

I actually have a cleaned up PDF with better images that were done for me by Belibaste, but the file is so huge I can't send it to anybody!

 

[The rabbit]

If anybody wants a copy of this impossible to get book, I have a scan of it.

I'd be interested in a copy too. At your convenience, of course. :)

Here's an online copy:
http://www.artificialcranialdeformation.info/Dingwall/index.htm

I actually have a cleaned up PDF with better images that were done for me by Belibaste, but the file is so huge I can't send it to anybody!

If Belibaste still has the file and is able to get it to me some how i can upload it to my server where people can get at it to download.