Tibetans inherited high-altitude gene from ancient human

Saw this this morning, along with the corporal who earned the Gallantry Cross (and fought with the GPMG tripod because he didn't have his khukuri)-his squad leader is going to have him walking around with his khuk dummycorded to him forever...
 
philllll said:
May help to explain the Gurkha's fierce reputation...
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If the Denisovans were so fierce, they might have wiped us out. I think cultural characteristics tend to be less genetically derived, and evolve faster than genes anyway.
 
archeogenetics is one of the coolest thing to come along in ages-- like they know that the irish are the closest related to the early natives of europe that were overtaken by the beaker culture-- and most modern jews are actually genetically descended from the italian penninsula, which makes sense when you think about the diaspora and abuse under titus and vespasian. the san people in africa are the oldest continuous genetic line on earth-- their y chromosome goes back 90 thousand years to bones they found in a valley I think in the south. I just love genetics and history and genetics is revealing lots of very cool things we could have never imagined about history.
 
Genetics is slowly changing the way we think about who we are, and while the human genome is vast, it's showing us what a small world we inhabit. Thanks for the link:thumbup:
 
Gehazi said:
-- and CC are actually genetically descended from the italian penninsula, which makes sense when you think about the diaspora and abuse under titus and vespasian.
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Not most modern Jews, most Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews.
 
exactly esav, my bad, there are the sephardic and mizrahim too, i just quoted memory of a paper read in passing, but I really love the stuff in archeogenetics.
 
I've spent a lot of time in Tibet, and some in Nepal, and while I don't pretend to understand all the science, I have seen firsthand how the people live in those high altitude environments. It's quite amazing.
 
This is a very interesting review of the high-altitude effects on humans as well as the different ways the Nepalese vs Peruvian Andes Mountain Indians bodies have adapted over the centuries to life in high-Altitude. I am constantly surprised as I learn new information about the adaptability of humans, As individuals we are oh so fragile in so many ways and engineering wise, we appear to be very ill conceived. But all in all as a species, we just seem to overcome most issues one way or the other.

http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_3.html
 
I get a bit confused by these things.

All modern humans came out of Africa. Then they had sex with other critters and got additions to the genome.

I thought if 2 critters could produce fertile offspring they were by definition the same species, in this case human. So all the humans weren't in Africa??? Or are "modern humans" a subspecies in the modern lingo.
 
mutations over time in local populations over several hundred thousand years-- everyone did come out of africa but we left in 4 or 5 waves and there are I think 8 or 9 species of humanoid ( denisovans, neaderthals etc) that we were able to interbreed with before the toba bottleneck, many of the other human groups actually developed before homo sapiens , neaderthals in europe and denisovans in the indonesian archipeligo i think, - but not entirely sure, but all homo species came out of africa, with the oldest continuous y chromosome on earth being the san people of southern africa- at over 90 thousand years-- and yeah modern humans are one of the group of great apes called Homo-- homo erectus , homo sapiens, homo neaderthalenis -- but some people put all these in a subgroup of homo sapiens, as in homo sapiens denisovan, homo sapiens neaderthalensis etc
 
I had some questions about this and did some reading, and I now see that Gehazi covered some of the same points.

From the summary of the research paper published in Nature this past week:

"As modern humans migrated out of Africa, they encountered many new environmental conditions, including greater temperature extremes, different pathogens and higher altitudes. These diverse environments are likely to have acted as agents of natural selection and to have led to local adaptations. One of the most celebrated examples in humans is the adaptation of Tibetans to the hypoxic environment of the high-altitude Tibetan plateau...Our findings illustrate that admixture with other hominin species has provided genetic variation that helped humans to adapt to new environments."
quoted from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13408.html


From National Geographic:

"When our ancestors first migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, they were not alone. At least two of our hominid cousins had made the same journey—Neanderthals and Denisovans... According to one theory, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans are all descended from the ancient human Homo heidelbergensis. Between 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, an ancestral group of H. heidelbergensis left Africa and then split shortly after. One branch ventured northwestward into West Asia and Europe and became the Neanderthals. The other branch moved east, becoming Denisovans. By 130,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis in Africa had become Homo sapiens—our ancestors—who did not begin their own exodus from Africa until about 60,000 years ago."
quoted from https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/


About "interbreeding", Wikipedia says this:

"As modern humans spread out from Africa they encountered other hominids such as Homo neanderthalensis and the so-called Denisovans. The nature of interaction between early humans and these sister species has been a long standing source of controversy, the question being whether humans replaced these earlier species or whether they were in fact similar enough to interbreed, in which case these earlier populations may have contributed genetic material to modern humans."
quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
 
Sounds like the scientists are still confused. I figure if I can have kids with it I'm calling it human.
 
Howard, for that to be true, you would have to assume kids are human...something I am loath to assume based on my own observations to date. LOL.
 
Had a chance to talk to my son about this. He is currently working on his PhD in evolutionary biology. Turns out there are many competing taxonomies and definitions for species. The one I learned in high school biology is Ernst Mayr's definition, known as the Biological Species Concept (BSC). However, depending on field, taxonomy used, and even academic politics, researchers may be using any one of several modern definitions. They have specialized names that some specialists can keep straight, but loose use of the terminologies still creates confusion.

The Wikipedia species article explains this a bit.
 
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