Neanderthals: A Genetic Analysis

The extinction of Neanderthals occurred thousands of years ago, but the question whether they interbred with modern humans remains unclear. Scientist claim that Neanderthals are seen as “transitional species” they fall in between homo erectus and modern humans, they lived with anatomically modern humans for long periods of time, but Neanderthals eventually went extinct and homo sapiens took over (Bonvillian and Miller 2013:274-275). The evidence used to support the answer whether modern humans and Neanderthals interbred or the affiliation of the two species comes from molecular testing and genetic material obtained from Neanderthal bone found at 3 site that indicate the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans. Also predicts the the …show more content…
It has been proposed that there is a definitive possibility that interbreeding might have occurred amid anatomically modern Africans and Neanderthals. It is believed that these interactions might have occurred in the Middle East before the expansion of Africans into Eurasia. The subpopulation model was employed as a tool in order to calculate possible genetic interbreeding and this process was handled with a great emphasis placed on simplicity and the understandability of the model and its findings. Consistent guidelines were put in place to maintain simplicity yet still being a realistic model at the same time, the two subpopulations at the core of this model include the African ancestors of people of mixed Asian and European ancestry also otherwise identified as Eurasians and the other one being the Middle Eastern Neanderthals. Certain assumptions were put in place pertaining to the two subpopulations, the total population will assumed to be fixed, a system determined on probability was utilized in terms of variability in population sizes, and lastly all individuals were assumed to have had the same fitness (Neves and Serva 2012). One pair of individuals would have to be exchanged between the two subpopulations every 77 generations for the stat of 1 to 4% of Neanderthal DNA in present day non-Africans to hold true. This was determined by finding the probability density of a single predetermined parameter, which was the rate of exchange of individuals between the two subpopulations. In recent memory the “out of Africa” model has been the excepted model when it came to the question of if Africans could have interbred with these local hominids. Now this long standing model was based on genetic evidence found through the palaeontology archaeology, while in

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