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Originally posted by umbratica
I've always thought Neanderthals were smarter than many people believe. We might even have some of their DNA in us...quite a thought!
Though it's a relative underdog among Neanderthal-demise theories, genetic swamping is a well-known extinction cause among plant and animal species.
A smallish group of native, localized trout, for example, may lose their genetic identity after a large influx of a different species with which the native fish are able to breed.
"When endemic populations are specialized, and for some reason there is a change in their interaction with adjacent populations, and that interaction level goes up, they tend to go extinct—especially if one population is much smaller than the other," Barton explained.
"In conservation biology this is called extinction by hybridization
Originally posted by umbratica
I've always thought Neanderthals were smarter than many people believe. We might even have some of their DNA in us...quite a thought!
Neanderthals may have been victims of love, or at least of interspecies breeding with modern humans, according to a new study.
As the heavy-browed species ventured farther and farther to cope with climate change, they increasingly mated with our own species, giving rise to mixed-species humans, researchers suggest.
Over generations of genetic mixing, the Neanderthal genome would have dissolved, absorbed into the Homo sapiens population, which was much larger.
"If you increase the mobility of the groups in the places where they live, you end up increasing the gene flow between the two different populations, until eventually one population disappears as a clearly defined group," said study co-author C. Michael Barton, an archaeologst at Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change.