Neandertals, Neandertals, Neandertals!

There has been so much news about Neandertals lately, I really don't know where to begin.  Most of it has been about the draft of a publication of the genome of Neandertals from Vindija, Croatia.  This particular piece is one of the more sensible assessments, and there is also a related piece by the same author that suggests the possibility Neandertals had an artistic bent.  As the author points out , there isn't any evidence that they painted on cave walls, like "modern" humans did at Chauvet Cave or later, at Lascaux or Altamira.  On the other hand, some workers have suggested that Neandertals did, in fact, paint Chauvet Cave.  Few people agree with this, but there's always the possibility. 

 

And oh, the discussions that have been going on!  Over at Anna's Bones, there's been an ongoing "did they or didn't they" discussion, generated in part by this latest announcement about Neandertal DNA.  The claims about "interbreeding or not" rely very heavily on the apparent lack of identifiable "Neandertal genes" in some "modern" human populations.  On the other hand, one has to bear in mind that human populations anywhere, 30,000 years ago, were probably relatively small and scattered.  This applies to "us" as well as Neandertals.  But one also has to bear in mind that Neandertal populations were even smaller and perhaps more scattered, than "modern" ones.  Therefore, there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity, most of the time, for them to meet and mix it up.  There is some evidence, however, that some populations, notably in the Iberian Peninsula, did, in fact, exchange genes from time to time, if the Lagar Velho child is any indication. The Lagar Velho fossil is dated to a period after Neandertals had apparently ceased to exist, but also apparently, the child seems to have some physical characteristics associated with that population, though it is considered to be a "modern" human.  This suggests that, in the Iberian Peninsula, the people there were pretty "mixed".  Finally, you have to bear in mind that even after there were no more Neandertals, Paleolithic populations were still pretty small, as "forager" societies often tend to be.  Once farming began to spread, populations that farmed had some leeway to get larger, and it's possible that the remaining "forager" humans were simply swamped or absorbed into the larger farming populations, just as Neandertals in certain areas, may have been similarly "swamped" genetically speaking, thousands of years earlier.  This, the possibility of finding genuine "Neandertal genes is probably vanishingly small. 

 

Finally, I give. for your consideration this Ode to Neanderthal 1, courtesy of the very interesting blog Caveman's Corner.  I think it is a fitting tribute to these fascinating prehistoric people, about whom we still know very little, and who, I think are often still essentially misunderstood.

Anne G

John Hawks explains it all

A quick update on the Neandertal genome sequencing news: The John Hawks Weblog has a long post explaining and clarifying a great deal of information about it. Much of the information was confusing to me, and this was partly due to bad science reporting. But then, there are very few science reporters out there, for whom I have a great deal of use, though that is another story. But for those of you who are interested in these kinds of things, you would do very well to click on the link I provided. It's worth the effort of going over there, and reading Dr. Hawks' rather long, but extremely imformative, post.
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

Good writing, but don't do this!

Barron, Stephanie
The Flaw in the Blood
Bantam Dell, 2008, 289 pp.
ISBN 978-0-553-80524-6

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the local library, browsing around for something worth reading, while waiting for another book(which I'll review tomorrow). I came away with A Flaw in the Blood. Though I hadn't paid much attention, I noticed that she was a mystery writer who wrote a series of "period" mysteries featuring Jane Austen. For the record, I tend to stay away from mysteries centering around real people solving fictional mysteries. To me, there's something kind of "off-putting" about authors who do this kind of thing, that is, having someone like Elizabeth I(yes, I've seen mystery series with her as the detective; I have stayed away from them, too) solve a mystery. I think you would have to be a pretty diehard mystery fan to enjoy these.

This particular mystery doesn't really have Queen Victoria solving any mysterie; even Stephanie Barron apparently knows she couldn't quite pull this off. It just wouldn't have been in character for Victoria, from what I know of her. But she does(sort of) attempt to introduce what we understand as science into the story, as part of the solution.

It's pretty well known that Queen Victoria her husband Prince Albert, had a lot of children. The youngest son, Leopold, lived to grow up, but died fairly young. due, apparently, to a cerebral hemorrhage. He apparently inherited hemophilia from her. And she seems to have passed hemophilia on to two of her daughters. Unfortunately, they passed hemophilia on to some of their children, with disastrous results. The best known result of this genetic flaw was Tsarevich Alexei, of Russia(the child of the unfortunate Nicholas and Alexandra, the latter of whom was Victoria's granddaughter). Of course the Bolsheviks probably weren't fully aware of the genetic end of things when all of them were shot, but that's another story.

Which brings me to the problem I ended up having with The Flaw in the Blood. It worked reasonably well as a mystery, until the very end. The blurbs on the back of the book say Ms. Barron is good at historical detail, and they're right: she got the style in which Victoria wrote pretty much right, and the relationships between various "classes", and their various conditions in England, also right, as well as the difficulties women had breaking into any profession(one of the main characters is a rare woman doctor).

Unfortunately, Ms. Barron should also have reread something on basic biology and genetics. If she knew that Victoria passed the "hemophilia gene" to three of her children, and some grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well, she should have known that a man can't pass hemophilia directly to any sons he might have. Because Ms. Barron made the assumption(a) that Victoria herself was the product of her mother, but not the man her mother married(he died before they could produce any more children, which is how Victoria ended up being Queen Victoria). And she implied that the lover passed hemophilia on, because the mystery is "solved" when they find a hemophiliac descendant of the same man.

Unfortunately, genetically speaking, this is impossible. The presence of hemophilia in Victoria was probably something she mutated and passed on, or else her mother mutated it and passed it on to her. Because the gene itself exists on the X chromosome(it's sex linked). This is so well-known that every beginning biology class I've ever heard of --- even in high school --- mentions this --- and often mentions poor Victoria, as well. And unfortunately a man can't passit on himself, because he only has one X chromosome. Women don't get it, because even if they have it passed down to them, they are chromosomally XX. Since it acts as a "dominant", any man who inherits his mother's X chromosome, will have hemophilia, and most hemophiliac men probably won't reproduce. At least they didn't in the past; most of them died too young. So if a man is reproducing chldren, unless something very strange is going on, he won't be passing hemophilia to any of his children. In this case, the woman really is "to blam", though it's really not under anyone's control, even these days.

And that, dear readers, spoiled the book for me. If you can't get the basic science right, either don't write a book with that science in it, and for heaven's sake, don't write something so wrong that even a complete nongeneticist can spot it. And kindly don't ask anyone to read it.
Anne G

Redheads forever

I knew it! Iknew it! According to this article in Nature, a respected science journal, some Neandertals had red hair, just like my Neanderlady picture! The reason? They had one variety of the MC1R gene, which under certain circumstances, produces red hair. Of course, the authors of the article are quick to point out, it wasn't "the same" as the "modern" one(I think they were probably a little too quick on this, but that's another story), but it had the same results.

Personally, I think that since MC1R seems to come in several different "varieties" or "strengths", as I understand it, it is hardly surprising that Neandertals may have had another "variety". But it is also not surprising that this "variety" seems to have more or less worked the same way as "modern" types of MC1R. Apparently, as I indicated in a post last week, Neandertals were "chatty" too, because they had the same version of FOXP2, which is one of the genes involved in speech. The more genes these people recover, the more Neandertals seem like "us"(or at least some of us), in important ways.

Anyway, I'd like to end this "newsflash" with a hint, related to my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals: the heroine, Illg, is not unlike my "Neanderlady". And her Neanderfriends who accompany her(sometimes) in her adventures through medieval England, are rather chatty, though none of the others are redheaded.
Anne G