Do you have Neanderthal DNA?

originally posted by: LadyGreenEyes
a reply to: CX

Hey, now! Ron Perlman might not be classically handsome, but he's not "ugly", either. He's got interesting features, and he played one of the most romantic TV characters ever in Beauty and the Beast, as Vincent.

I use that line all the time with the old lady. "If you're ugly enough, it becomes cute"

I've got neanderthal DNA, my girlfriend and I actually just had our genomes sequenced by 23andme.com. And it will tell you approximately how much Neanderthal DNA one has. I'm hoping they'll get Denisovans up there as well once they've managed to sequence that groups DNA. Having about 9 percent Asian DNA it's possible I've got some from that group as well.

It's very cool to see the results, you never really know where your ancestors came from ( we each have so many ) at 99 dollars it won't break the bank either.

a reply to: nemonimity

Slightly annoying that a lot of things cost a lot less in the US, here in the UK the 23andme ancestry test is £125 or $182.89.

I am considering it, though I would like more details about the results it gives, I guess it's worth it.

At a guess I think I might have some Asian DNA, golden skin, facial skin that doesn't wrinkle in average Western way, no crows feet, facial shape slightly asian.

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

I think UK 23andme users are able to get way more information, so maybe that's the difference in the cost.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: LadyGreenEyes
a reply to: CX

Hey, now! Ron Perlman might not be classically handsome, but he's not "ugly", either. He's got interesting features, and he played one of the most romantic TV characters ever in Beauty and the Beast, as Vincent.

I use that line all the time with the old lady. "If you're ugly enough, it becomes cute"

That can be true! Plus, "beauty" isn't all that can be appealing. A face with character, and interesting features, can have quite a lot of appeal, and personality can add to that. I like the cute guys as much as anyone - don't get me wrong - but some of the actors I have found appealing weren't the ones a lot of people might guess. John Lithgow, for example, had, for years, a weird appeal, and many ladies I worked with agreed, though we couldn't pin it down. Personality is the best guess there!

haha green eyes, red hair, sloping brow are supposed to be neanderthals? that makes me laugh.

a reply to: stayinglowkey

Nope not the red hair. It is caused by different mutations for the two species. Humans have two mutant genes that cause red hair, neither are the same as the Neanderthals, and well eye color is very compex (more than one gene is involved).

This thread is exposing a lot of myths about what people have "read" about neanderthals. Sadly some are a little prejudicial

Double post.

a reply to: Noinden

I know about the DNA of Neanderthal to an extent, given that only a small amount is currently known. I have written about it plenty on ATS.

That said, seeing as I have yet to obtain DNA analysis pertaining to my percentage of Neanderthal DNA, I based my comment on appearance as one of the questions was about whether one is attracted to those of possible Neanderthal appearance. The thread isn't exactly very scientific and has an element of humour, so my comment is within these parameters.

As for red hair and blue eyes, the Neanderthal variants are using the same gene just in different ways, ways that aren't seen in African populations, as Neanderthal DNA. The study of evolution / Neanderthal /Cro Magnon /HSS and the genetics of is not yet complete, there are new and interesting finds often, such as the percentage of neanderthal DNA in humans. There is the possibility that red hair and blue eyes were inherited from Neanderthal when the studies are more detailed.

I suspect a lot of the comments are similarly explaining their visual appearance rather than being ignorant of the facts, I happen to know at least a few of the comments are from fellow members that I have seen posting on other threads in a factual manner.

www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...&mem=theabsolutetruth
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...&mem=theabsolutetruth
www.abovetopsecret.com...&mem=theabsolutetruth

Neanderthal inheritance information.

www.eupedia.com...

All Eurasian people apparently inherited various Neanderthalian genes relating to the immune system (e.g. HLA types), including genes that increased the risk for some autoimmune diseases such as type-2 diabetes and Crohn's disease. Physical features inherited from Neanderthal by Europeans and Middle Easterners include prominent eyebrows, big eyes, strong jaws and wide shoulders. 70% of East Asians also inherited mutations in the POU2F3 gene, which is involved in keratin production and may be responsible for straightening hair.

According to the Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, the current level of hair colour diversity in Europe would have taken 850,000 years to develop, while Homo sapiens has been in Europe no longer than 45,000 years. This is evidence enough that genes for fair hair were inherited from interbreeding with Neanderthals.

DNA tests demonstrated that Neanderthals possessed fair skin, and at least some subspecies had reddish hair too.

Homo sapiens apparently did not inherit the whole light skin, light eyes and light hair package at once, but through continuous interbreeding with various Neanderthal subspecies in Europe, the Middle East and Central over tens of thousands of years. It has been confirmed that Mesolithic Europeans had blue eyes, but dark skin and dark hair.

There are several genes influencing skin colour. Among them, the BNC2 gene, which influences saturation of skin colour and is responsible for freckling, was confirmed by Sankararaman et al. (2014) to have been come from Neanderthal. It is found at varying frequencies in all Eurasian populations and is most common among Europeans (70% have at least one copy of the Neanderthalian version, against 40% for East and South Asians). Mutations in the SLC24A5 gene, responsible for 40% of skin colour variations between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans, appear to have been spread to Europe by Neolithic farmers from the Near East and especially by the Proto-Indo-Europeans from the Pontic Steppe during the Bronze Age (more info). Mutations for blond and red hair have yet been not found in ancient European samples prior to the Bronze Age. So it seems that fair skin and blond or red hair were originally passed on to Homo sapiens in the Middle East or Central Asia, rather than in Europe.

As for the genes for light eyes, there is a relatively high likelihood that they were inherited from Neanderthals too, rather than having emerged independently in Europeans fairly recently. It hasn't been proven yet that Neanderthals had blue, green or hazel eyes because only one Neanderthal sample has been fully sequenced at present. But the statistical probability that such mutations would arise and be positively selected in Neanderthals, who evolved for 300,000 years in the high latitudes of Europe, is far higher than in European Homo sapiens, who have lived for only 45,000 years in Europe, and less than 30,000 years in northern Europe. Not all Neanderthal groups would have been blue eyed, though. Neanderthals were much more genetically diverse than modern humans, who all share a recent ancestry three times earlier in time than Neanderthals subspecies between themselves. If blue eyes indeed originated in Neanderthal, different Neanderthal populations could have passed blue eyes genes several times to Homo sapiens in Europe, the Middle East or Central Asia. It's not even granted that the two main genes, OCA2 and HERC2, were passed at the same time or to the same people. They might only have converged later in Europeans. Another alternative is that only one of these genes came from Neanderthal while the other arose in Homo sapiens.

Mesolithic Europeans from Spain and Luxembourg have been confirmed to have possessed the HERC2 mutation for blue eyes (see Olade et al. (2014) and Lazaridis et al. (2014)). This mutation is also found in parts of Asia settled by the Proto-Indo-European speakers belonging to the paternal lineages R1a and R1b, including the Altai, southern Siberia, Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent. Since the the Proto-Indo-Europeans carried very different paternal lineages from Mesolithic Europeans (Y-haplogroups C, F and I), and only shared a few very old maternal lineages, like haplogroups U4 and U5, their HERC2 mutation could have been inherited from a common Paleolithic ancestor or passed on by two different groups of Neanderthals to separate Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens.

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

I don't believe I was repying to you there however Genomics is an area I have a lot of experience in.

Thus a couple of points.

The red hair for humans and neandethals are from different mutations. Thus different genes. source

Eye color is an inherited trait influenced by more than one gene. source and source

Indeed blue eyes are believed to have arisen from a single ancestor (around 10 000 years back) when a mutaion occured (wounder what their parents thought ) near the black sea.source Green eyes are thought to also be around this time.

I understand this is a very unscientific thread, there is nothing wrong with injecting science, and debunking bad ideas. Such as "higher 0xygen in the past" for neanderthals (who also "lived longer" were "peaceful" blah blah blah)

a reply to: Noinden

As I said hair colour, eye colour, skin colour are from the same genes, just different versions or used in different ways.

Also, seeing as there is so little Neanderthal DNA yet available, discounting the possibility of further ancestral links is not being ruled out and might well be proven correct in the future.

genetics.thetech.org...

Back in 2001, some researchers speculated that the "red hair" gene of Europeans came in too many varieties to have come from human stock. They reasoned that it must have come from somewhere else. The most likely candidate was the folks living in Europe when humans got there -- the Neanderthals.

Since then, most of the evidence has not supported humans and Neanderthals regularly having babies together. Most likely, we were fighters and not lovers and wiped the poor species out. What this all means is that Europeans probably aren't Neanderthal-human hybrids.

Scientists did recently show that at least some Neanderthals had red hair. But this turned out to be evidence against interbreeding. Why? Because Neanderthals end up with red hair in a way not yet seen in people.

Now I don't mean they had red hair because they used a different gene than Europeans do. Both Neanderthals and Europeans use the same gene to get red hair -- MC1R. The difference is that they both use the gene a bit differently.

So for right now it looks like humans got their red hair from their own genes. But keep in mind that scientists haven't looked at the DNA from a lot of different Neanderthals yet.

It might be that Neanderthals had lots of ways to end up with red hair and we happened to find one way that we don't share. If scientists do find some human versions of the MC1R gene in Neanderthals, then that would support the idea that the two interbred.

(Although remember this would just be one piece of evidence against a whole lot of evidence against interbreeding.)

I thought what I'd do next is go into a bit more detail about all of this. Even though it looks like red hair didn't come from Neanderthals, we still don't have a good explanation for why there are so many different versions of the MC1R gene in Europeans.

MC1R and Red Hair

As I said before, red hair happens because of the MC1R gene. Well, it actually happens when this gene can't do its job quite right.

See, each gene is really just the recipe for a specific protein. And each protein has a specific role in the cell.

The MC1R gene has the instructions for making the MC1R protein. And one role of this protein is to get rid of the pigment that gives red hair, pheomelanin.

Some people have versions of the gene that can't do this job very well. The end result is that they get a build up of red pigment and have red hair.

Now this isn't what made people think that red hair came from Neanderthals. For example, blue eyes (and most every other trait) happen in the same way and no one is claiming that we inherited blue eyes from Neanderthals.

What makes red hair different is that there are so many different versions of the MC1R gene. And that there has been so little time for them to happen.

Gene Changes and Time

As humans, we all share nearly the exact set of genes. What makes us each different is we have different versions of these same genes.

For example, some people have red hair versions of the MC1R gene and have red hair. Other people have different MC1R gene versions and don't have red hair.

The same sort of thing goes for eye color and the HERC2 gene. Or skin color and the SLC24A5 gene. Or most any other trait you can think of and its associated gene(s).

All of these different gene versions are there because of DNA changes that happened at some point in our history. People tend to think of DNA as stable and written in stone and for the most part it is. But even stones can get chips once in a while.

DNA can and does change over time. But very slowly. And it seems like humans were in Europe for too short a time for there to be so many different versions of the MC1R gene.

I am certain to have DN A strands other than sapiens-sapiens
see my heritage is Lithuanian from the mothers side and Polish on the husbands/fathers side
'so yeah... I have the typical European upper body and the lesser developed lower body and legs, and do not have the long muscle cells of a sprinter or basketball player...

im more or less still designed to thug a mastadon with a stout spear after methodically hunting and exhausting the prey

but I do not personally have that iconic profile of the pop-culture Neanderthal person...however
I do not require all the new exotic healing medicines like most all of society... the generics at a minimal dose have always been effective for any maladies had gotten, being a Taurus Earth person & green-thumb pagan allowed me to embrace Shamanism rather than modern faiths, my spirit guides are Owl-Turtle-Cave Bear...

its all these widely diffuse elements that makes me empathize or resonate with a much-much distant ancestor line...in fact I have had past-life soul searches and my last life-incarnation resembled a tribal character in the book/movie 'Clan of the Cave Bear' (more than 200k years ago but certainly less than 1 million years ago...)


but, in this line of thought... I think we are inadvertently creating a return to that NAZI 'master race' body of thought if we are not careful to tread lightly...

a reply to: Bedlam

Joseph Merrick wants a word.

originally posted by: GetHyped
a reply to: Bedlam

Joseph Merrick wants a word.

I'll never be mistaken for Tom Cruise, so it's got that going for it.