Beautiful black wolves and how they got that way

Most wolves are various shades of gray.  Some, who live in northern Alaska, or on Arctic islands, are shaggy and white.  But then there are black wolves.  Most black wolves live in North America.  For instance, in Yellowstone Park, about half the wolves roaming that area are black or very dark.  The picture below is a very

good illustration.  But in Eurasia, they're either gray or "arctic white".  How did that happen, you ask.  You can get one explanation for this from the John Hawks weblog, which has a link to an article in the New York Times(which also has this picture) of a report showing that North American wolves seem to have gotten this gene for melanism -- because what it is -- from dogs!  Yes, dogs.  The report doesn't say exactly when "dog" genes made their way into wild "wolf" DNA, and the authors, as well as Dr. Hawks, seemed to think that this genetic characteristic got into North American wolves pretty early on -- like when the first people came over -- with their (most likely) wolflike dogs, from "Beringia" to the Americas.  That was at least 12,000 years ago, ad probably a lot longer ago than that.  I don't know whether I agree or disagree with this, but it raises some pretty interesting questions.  There are melanistic coyotes, too, and they apparently got the gene from domestic dogs, too.

 

First of all, nowadays, many who study canids(dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals), can't tell you, genetically where wolves end and dogs begin. In other words, dogs are basically domesticated wolves.  This may be hard to believe if you are staring at a chihuahua, but genetically, it's true.  And to make things even more complicated, all members of the genus Canis are apparently able to interbreed and produce perfectly fertile offspring, thank you very much.  Where else do people get the notorious wolf hybrids some people love and a lot of other people can't stand?  How else would it come to be, that in some parts of the North American continent, approximately 75% of all "wolves" have "coyote" gene sequences?  So it's hardly surprising that under some circumstances, wolves and dogs might mate.  That's probably how some of the "Husky" breeds got started.  So it isn't too surprising that wolves and dogs exchanged genes, in this case, for coat color.  They're all so closely related anyway, that wolves and coyotes, at least have nearly identical behaviors:  their mating seasons and gestation periods are the same, they both form packs and raise young "collectively", they have "dispersers" and "abiders" among their members, both of them howl for various reasons.  The principal difference between them appears to be size, and even this isn't absolute.  There are some fairly large coyotes and some fairly "dainty" wolves.  The same is even more true of domestic dogs and wolves. 

 

So how does this relate to people, one might ask?  Well, my own theory, arrived at in a totally unscientific way, is that all members of the genus Homo(we "modern" humans are Homo (sapiens) sapiens) were about as closely related to each other as wolves, dogs, coyotes, etc. and therefore were at least potentially able to interbreed.  I don't know about Homo erectus(and hardly anybody else does, either), but since Neandertals have been the most closely studied, of all "non-modern" human groups, it seems that they and "modern" humans were at least as closely related to each other as wolves, coyotes, and dogs are.  That doesn't necessarily mean they were, as the scientific parlance goes, "interfertile", but it's a reasonably good indicator that this was possible.  And while the evidence in this regard is contradictory, and therefore, results in arguments between factions, I suspect that some of this went on, and I don't mean just a "one time happening".  I suspect, as does Dr. Hawks, that there were times and places when these little groups of humans met.  Each group might have considered the other to be rather "funny looking", and no doubt they sometimes tried to fight each other, rather than acted peaceably.  It's the "human way", so to speak, to be both peaceable, at times, and aggressive at others, and I don't doubt Neandertals and "modern" humans did both. 

 

However, when both groups in the same location were in "peaceable" mode, they might well have exchanged mates, in a variety of ways, and for a variety of reasons.  Not all of these mate exchanges might have resulted in offspring who lived to have their own offspring, but it may well be that some did. If Erik Trinkaus is right(and he's a Neandertal expert), then the Lagar Velho child is such a child, and it came from such a "mixed" population.  Such mixings might well have come from elsewhere, and might go a long way to explain why both Neandertals and "modern" humans have the FOXP2 gene, which is involved in speech.  It also might go a way to explain why some Neandertals in some places, get more "gracile" toward the end of their existence.  The Vindija fossil, from which Svante Pääbo and his molecular genetics team got the Neandertal genome they intend to publish next week, was apparently one of these.  So it will be interesting, to say the least, to see what Pääbo and his team have to say about this, next week.  In the meanwhile, we have these beautiful black wolves to ponder.

Anne G

Subjects medieval and Neandertalish

There's lots of bloggable stuff I've come across today, both on the "medieval" front and on the Neandertal front, so to speak. 

 

First, to the medieval:  Elizabeth Chadwick's blog Living the History has a rather long, but extremely interesting post about medieval horse types.  I knew  some of this before I read the post.  I knew the horse types -- destrier, palfrey, rouncy, were used for different purposes.  Destriers were specially-trained warhorses, and generally ridden only in battle(often not for long; most medieval battles (a) were or ended up being fought on foot and (b) a rider could get unhorsed.  If he got unhorsed, he was vulnerable).  These specially trained horses were quite valuable.  People of means also had palfreys, which were used for "ordinary" riding purposes.  Again, these were quite valuable.  Finally, there were rouncys or rounceys.  These horses were, "garden variety" so to speak -- a horse that would basically get you from Point A to Point B without being too "fancy".  Then there were also "sumpter" horses, that is pack animals.  According to Ms. Chadwick, you'd have to be pretty desperate in medieval terms, to end up riding one of these.  There was lots more detail and some nice illustrations, which I absorbed with great interest.  The reason for all of this is, that horses play a not inconsiderable role in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertal(because in my "universe" the tarpans -- the original wild horses of Eurasia, which were sometimes painted on cave walls -- were important to the Dauarga/Neandertal people on the planet they, and most of these tarpans had been taken to for a while.  In any case, it is interesting to note(and I have put this in the first book of this trilogy -- that the destriers of the period I'm writing about weren't these great big "draft" type horses you sometimes see in pictures.  They tended to be rather small, muscular, and fast, somewhat like the wild mustangs of the American west, Camargue horses, certain modern Spanish "breeds", and Appaloosas, either in size, or in general shape.  But a lot of the horses of this time were even smaller(that's where the tarpans com in) -- they were pony sized, that is, 13 hands or less.  Just FYI a "hand" is four inches.  Which makes one wonder about the size and weight of either the people or the horses.  In any case, I will give you another hint about my story:  there is a recognizably spotted "Appaloosa" type horse in it.  I chose Appaloosas as a model because in size and shape they seem to resemble the medieval types above.  Not that I know that much about horses.  Though I do  know a great deal about cats, and there is a cat that weaves in and out of my story, and she's a rather special cat.  That's all I'm going to say about cats at the moment, though.   Thanks, Elizabeth Chadwick!

 

On the Neandertal front, it seems that Greg Laden's Blog and the John Hawks Weblog are trumpeting the announcement from Svante Pääbo's genetics lab, that they have sequenced a complete Neandertal genome from someone who lived 38,000 years ago, in a cave near Vindija, Croatia.  Pääbo and his team have been pioneers in sequencing Neandertal genes, and they have made some quite interesting announcements about certain things, which have caused controversy.  And, for the record, people have interpreted all these announcements in various ways, according to their understanding of Neandertals and their lives.  Some of them have even attempted to spin elaborate tales from all of this -- and some of these tales are more believable than others.  As far as taking a "stand" on any of these issues, I have my opinions, but I don't see any point in reiterating them here.  They will become fairly obvious to anyone who reads my books -- I don't plan for all of them to be medieval-themed, though my present work is, of course.  But for now, I'm kept quite busy gathering information on both "fronts" as well as revising the first draft of my book, hopefully into a fashion that is publishable, and interesting.  In any case, the sequencing of the genome is quite exciting, though I will probably disagree with some of the conclusions.  Quite frankly, though there are some workers in paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology whose views re Neandertals come closer to mine than others, I don't entirely agree with any of them, which I think in the long run is a good idea.  After all, my story is unique in some ways(I don't claim it's completely unique, though).  One more interesting thing about this announcement:  The Pääbo people are planning to announce the "complete" Neandertal genome on the birthday of the most famous discoverer of the theory of evolution -- Charles Darwin. His birthday falls on February 12, which, for any American readers, is also the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, though that gets into a whole different story.

Anne G

Neandertal genome news

The latest edition of the journal Cell has a report that some people from the Max Planck Institute in Germany have sequenced a whole Neandertal genome.

Here is the report:

http://www.physorg.com/news137334959.html">Complete Neandertal mitochondrial genome sequenced from 38,000-year-old bone from PhysOrg.com
A study reported in the August 8th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, reveals the complete mitochondrial genome of a 38,000-year-old Neandertal. The findings open a window into the Neandertals' past and helps answer lingering questions about our relationship to them.
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This blurb doesn't say much, so the astute reader may want to go here for further information. The article came from the British journal Nature, and has some comments, though not much more explanation, about the genome.

My own thoughts about this paper go like this:

I don't think there's any doubt in anybody's mind that Neandertals were a distinct population Their anatomy alone, whilc basically similar to ours, has some pretty "distinct" features, like their browridges and the "buns" on the bakc of their skull, and the shape of those skulls, though at least one worker in the field suggests that their brains were arranged pretty much like ours(he deduced this from endocasts). They also had denser bones and more muscle attachments, than "modern" people.

But what does all this really mean? The geneticists who pulled together their "Neandertal genome", admit themselves, that there need to be more sequences done on specimens from other Neandertal populations. And they admit that while certain proteins they sequenced(if I understand this study correctly), have somewhat different DNA sequences, they apparently functioned no differently from "ours">

Given that Neandertals are the best known of all prehistoric humans(other than early "modern" ones), and had the fortunate(for us) habit of burying their dead with some regularity, there are more Neandertal fossils lying around, waiting to be sequenced by these methods, than any other prehistoric human fossils. Furthermore, they were the first non-"modern" humans ever discovered, so they have been scrutinized in various ways, for a little over 150 years.

One would think that, since tremendous changes in our understanding of inheritance, and the acceptance --- by most educated people --- that evolution has taken place, one might think many of the questions surrounding the rise and demise of Neandertals would have been answered. But they are basically the same old questions, and there seems to be a tendency for a lot of people to assume, just as they assumed back when the unfortunate La Chapelle aux Saintes fossil was discovered, that they were basically "different" and "not like us at all". But what archaeological evidence there is, seems to suggest that while they were(apparently) a decidedly small population, they also had pretty much the same behaviors and responses that "modern" humans do, to a variety of things.

Because of this, many people are faced with the dilemma of trying to figure out how much "like" us, they were, given that there seem to have been some populations of prehistoric humans with "mixed" ancestry --- long after there were any Neandertals --- and so far, none of these questions have been settled to anybody's satisfaction. This study is a step in some direction: they appear to have been "different" all right. And there are plenty of people who do not want to consider that there might have been any connection at all, between Neandertals and "modern" humans. These people latch on to studies like this, with the tenacity of hungry wolves trying to make meals out of the nearest deer, and insist that Neandertals were a totally "separate species". But what constitutes speciation depends on a lot of factors, for evolution, human and otherwise, is a complicated, messy business. Since no one has yet satisfactorily answered how much "difference" actually constitutes speciation(other than the inability of two separate organisms to mate and produce fertile offspringa), what we are left with, is essentially judgment calls as to what these ki8nds of differences "mean". Since I'm a writer writing a Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, I can't claiim to know what these differences "mean", though I have my opinions. Be that as it may, I think this study will probably raise even more questions about Neandertals, their relationship(if any) to "us", and what "happened" to them, than it ever can answer. And the arguments surrounding these questions, will go on for a long, long time after numerous other studies(which probably won't answer these questions either), have come and gone.
Anne G