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Saturday, June 29, 2019

THE NEANDERTHAL IN ME



Today I’m going to explain in both a genetic and evolutionary level the very reasons that may explain why my queen M. fears me (maybe her own insanity or TBI in the end….) Both Neanderthals and modern humans were initially thought to have evolved from Homo erectus between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago (WOW that’s truly nothing on an evolutionary scale). Homo erectus had emerged around 1.8 million years ago, and had long been present, in various subspecies throughout Eurasia.
In Eurasia, interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans with modern humans took place several timesJ. The introgression event that evolved into modern humans (us….) is estimated to have happened about 47,000–65,000 years ago (another WOW…..but wait now….) with Neanderthals and about 44,000–54,000 years ago with Denisovans.
Many of these traits are present in us can be explained to varying extent due to both archaic admixture and the retention of ancestral hominid traits shared with Neanderthals and other archaic humans. Nothing is certain (what’s new??) about the shape of soft parts such as eyes, ears, and lips (or penises J) of Neanderthals.
Neanderthals have contributed approximately 1-4% of the genomes of non-African modern humans, although a modern human who lived about 40,000 years ago has been found to have between 6-9% of Neanderthal DNA.
Fossil teeth from Italy (me!), are among the oldest human remains on the Italian Peninsula, they show that Neanderthal dental features had evolved by around 450,000 years ago. A few years ago a handful of teeth dated to around 450,000 years ago were examined by scientists and found to have a striking resemblance to those of Neanderthals -like-CarloJ.
Some of the oldest human remains ever found in Italy have provided fresh insights into the human evolution in Europe. The Italian teeth are distinct from any others found across the Eurasian landmass at this time, suggesting that various human lineages were found across the region. One calcite-encrusted skeleton of an ancient human, still embedded in rock deep inside a cave in Italy, has provided the oldest Neanderthal DNA ever found (my great – great – great grandpaJ). In the Monti Lessini (North East Italy, Verona) was found in 1957 an ancient jaw with mitochondrial DNA. The analysis performed on this jaw and on other cranial fragments showed at the same stratigraphic level has led to the identification of the only genetically typed Neanderthal of the Italian peninsula and has confirmed through direct dating that it belongs to a late Neanderthal individual.
Situated in the southern slopes of the Alps, at Castenedolo (my dad’s birds hunting area), six miles southeast of Brescia (my birth town), lays a low hill called Colle del Vento (hill of the wind, in Italian), where millions of years ago during the Pliocene period, layers of mollusks and coral were deposited by a warm sea washing in (what? where?).
The bones from Castenedolo, near Brescia, belong to several skeletons of men, women, and children and were found on various occasions in a shelly bed of sand and clay, of marine origin and of Pliocene age. In 1899, the discovery of a new human skeleton was the subject of an official report by Professor Issel, who then observed that the various fossils from this deposit were all impregnated with salt, with the sole exception of the human fossils.... It seems certain that at in Castenedolo we are dealing with burials. What we know today, is that Neanderthal people cared for their children, teaching them what they needed to know. They also cared for the injured (like me now) and sick, and when Neanderthals died — particularly children and infants — they were buried with care and respect. Children learned how to make toy axes too. This not only taught them how to use the tools but instilled a social context. More than a third of Neanderthal graves found contain children under the age of 4, typically showing great care in their burials.
It’s also assumed that Neanderthals had some form of marriage because pair-bonding between men and women, and joint provisioning for their offspring, had been a feature of men in social life for over a million years already. They also protected corpses by covering them with rocks or placing them in shallow pits, suggesting the kinds of intimate, social and cognitive interaction typical of our own family life. The symbolism, complexity and time invested in the objects and jewelry found buried with the remains also suggests that it is possible that they developed rules, ceremonies and rituals to accompany the exchange of mates between groups, which perhaps foreshadowed modern marriage ceremonies, and may have been similar to those still practiced by hunter-gatherer communities in parts of the world today. In short we’ve had weddings and funerals for about 80.000 years (if not more) AND men have been taking care and be jealous of their mates (= our wives) for about the same amount of time!!
A cognitive ability that evolved in modern humans as a result was the “cheater detection JJJ” ability (that’s why I’m still a f…..ing Neanderthal).
Neanderthals were likely to have practiced patriarchal mating behavior. It was clearly found that no single hybridization occurred in the "late" phase of contacts in Europe since 45,000 years. In the reverse case there was no single DNA trace from Homo sapiens found in the fossils of European Neanderthals. The Neanderthal man stood with his peers and the woman continued a so called monogamous partnership in her clan and nobody would know (unless the baby looked different).... This makes already two interpretations at the level of interspecific mating behavior. It's been suggested that encounters between modern humans and Neanderthals were rare and happened in the Middle East or the Arabian Peninsula after modern humans went out of Africa, but before they spread widely. When moderns did expand all over Eurasia, they carried Neanderthal DNA in their cells. Later studies of ancient DNA from a 45,000-year-old modern human in Romania helped to pinpoint the time of that encounter to between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago (only??J).
New research has found that early humans seem to have recognized the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it.
I’d truly be interested in the reason my former queen M. may have about my saying that she was my wife is unacceptable “because people cannot be owned like a car or some other objects, “people are people”.
My reply from now on is simply going to be (IF and when I’ll ever see her again….): “haven’t you understood that I’m still here alive ONLY because my Neanderthal genes are still active, you’d be visiting a cemetery if I was like your lover B. (dick M.D.) I'd be surely be already dead... just like B. is going to be sooner than later😎!!


  1. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/02/23/mounting-evidence-for-neanderthal-inbreeding/ 
  2. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/10/04/neanderthals-stopped-humans-wiped-flu/
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/aug/25/neanderthal-denisovan-genes-human-immunity
  5. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgotten-return-to-africa-revealed-in-dna/
  6. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/nov/16/dear-professor-husband-neanderthal
  7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy








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