Finding our Inner Neanderthal: Evolutionary Geneticist Svante Pääbo's DNA Quest

March 25, 2014 - Part of the "Genome: Unlocking Life's Code" exhibition events.
Can the DNA of extinct humans provide a clue to our origins? Noted researcher Svante Pääbo discusses a groundbreaking investigation that led to new genetic and geographic connections between Homo sapiens and our ancient ancestors.
More information on the exhibition and events: www.genome.gov/Smithsonian/

[@puccini4530]

90 minutes of my life - well spent.

[@ericvulgate]

what the heck is up with all the (unintelligible) in the captions? at no point is the speaker (unintelligible) for one thing- at any rate why would someone not go back within 5 years and fill (unintelligible) in?

[@songyardbird2513]

Think of all the brilliant minds that would be available to solve the worlds problems and questions if higher education were/was free.

[@DavidAMbah]

Very informative and interesting. Could be part of a first course in genetics and anthropology.

[@timblack6422]

Outstanding presentation!

[@Esther216]

I had my dna dome by 2 companies and was surprised how many Neanderthal markers I had in my dna

[@jeromezelinske1763]

Love the shout out to UW Madison

[@kwnorton5834]

Does blood type have anything to do with this?

[@crowesarethebest]

Wonderful presentation. It's exciting to learn how humans evolved.

[@asmaben1114]

Cro-Magnons were pretty special too....in another way.

[@saqqarabird6698]

Saturday, November 23, 2019 Archaic Admixture, Hybridization, and Human Racial Origins Scientists have sequenced a 37,000-year-old European genome. The results show that present-day Europeans are the closest living relatives to the first people in Europe. The genome also indicates that many European traits, including those from the Middle East, were already present in the first Europeans. The study, which was recently published in Science, sheds entirely new light on who we are as Europeans, which was originally a separate species from African lineages. An international team of scientists have sequenced the genome of a 37,000-year-old male skeleton found in Kostenki in Russia. It turns out that Scandinavians, Balts and Slavs are more closely related to the Kostenki man than any other now-living population. This means that northern Europeans are the earliest Europeans. The study, which was recently published in Science, sheds entirely new light on who we are as Europeans. "From a genetic point of view he's a European," says Professor Eske Willerslev, Director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, who was involved in the new study, and adds: "Actually, he is closer to Danes, Swedes, Finns and Russians than to Frenchmen, Spaniards and Germans”. Split happened within a 8.000 year gap The new results reveal that the man is the oldest that we know of so far to genetically represent a separate line from the forebears of present-day Asians. This is decisive when it comes to dating one of the most important events in history. "We can now date the separation time between Asians and Europeans." He points out that the Kostenki genome sets a line 37,000 years ago. Here the lines must have split, while the 45,000-year-old genome from the recently discovered Ust' Ishim in Siberia sets the limit in the other direction. This gives the answer to one of the biggest questions in the history of mankind; scientists now know that it is within the 8000 year gap that Europeans and Asians went their separate ways. Meta-population: sex across populations. A meta-population consists of several populations which mate with each other. The meta-population is connected through the neighbor's neighbors, consisting of people who generally resemble each other a lot, but who also have their own unique traits. "It was a huge, complex network, and not separate branches that lived in isolation,” says Willerslev. He believes the Europeans must have been one enormous meta-population stretching across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. The study, which was recently published in Science, sheds entirely new light on who we are as Europeans, which was originally a separate species from African lineages.

[@altheacraig2904]

I'd like to know why there are so many different languages in the world?

[@dorasmith7875]

Think maybe they shambled like... Celts?

[@tinytinky9975]

Svante Pääbo has a dry sort of humor. Knochentrocken XD.

[@harperwelch5147]

I just drag the red button over a quarter inch or so to skip them.

[@mivdschu]

I'm prepared to give a DNA sample to look for some back mutations...

[@frankjoseph7259]

Anyone out there need 20 pieces of gum to just start chewing ? I may be part Neanderthal.

[@reynardus1359]

These long introductions just leave you glassy-eyed. Five minutes of whatever.

[@nahshon9998]

First of all, Neanderthals were fully human. I had a guy at an event that had a very sloped forehead. There is a picture of a Russian boxer that had a very sloped forehead. Look up Nikolai Sergeyevich Valuev, And we know that Neanderthals lived with human and were human. So, no, they are not extinct. They are humans just like this guy is.

[@GaryR55]

Yes, as are all hominids. We're simply the last remaining hominid species of many that have gone extinct. But, yes, they live on in our genes.

[@jorgikralj905]

Exellent! Just keep on!

[@avaelizabeth4808]

23 and me said i have 83 percent neanderthal...my heritage is Hungarian ..

[@nathanokun8801]

If creation of neanderthals in a lab is possible, then somebody in the future is going to do it, ethics be damned. What we do with this creation is going to be a study in our own ethics...

[@WolfGrrl1]

Yeenome

[@panderichthys_rhombolepis]

If you notice *Päabo had a speech defect:* He cannot pronounce the soft 'g' (ie., 'g' as in 'germ', 'gem', 'geology', etc.). Instead, he pronounces 'g' as a 'y'; *hence 'genome' becomes 'yeenome'* .

[@goosiechild]

this defect is known as a Swedish accent. hence, like.

[@EattinThurs61]

He is a Swede. English ( and others) can not pronounce "y" like we do in swedish. It is somewhere between ie, & ee...

[@sgrannie9938]

It’s an accent, not a defect. ✌🏼

[@aceis_5113]

I know some people are going to be upset about this comment. I really am not trying to offend anyone...but..in 2010, the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was completed and it was discovered that all non-African humans had Neanderthal DNA. Scientists comparing the full genomes of Humans and Neanderthals concluded that most Europeans and Asians have approximately 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. It was stated that the proportion of Neanderthal-inherited genetic material is about 1 to 4 percent and is found in all non-African populations. It is suggested that 20 percent of Neanderthal DNA survived and is currently present in all non-african humans on the planet and can be seen in the skin, hair, diseases and the reduced reproductive fitness of modern people (Europeans and Asians). Scientist know that Neanderthals were very highly inbred and carried an extremely large amount of dangerous mutations. Could the reason the corona virus is more fatal to Europeans and Asians be due to the fact that Europeans and Asians share 99.7% of their DNA with Neanderthals. In 2016, Ivan Juric stated the following in his article entitled The Strength of Selection against Neanderthal Introgression: Neanderthal genes are recessive and weakly selected against, this means they are slowly being purged from the human genome. Is this why the whole world has been shut down to contain this virus? This didn't happen with any other virus. Not H1N1, Ebola, SARS, MERS no other virus!!!! I was wondering why the whole earth got shut down. Could we be seeing the extinction of Europeans and Asians? Is this what's going on?

[@taliadavid858]

No.

[@Mdebacle]

The most incredible thing about this research is that somehow the conclusion is Eurasian humans are hybrids of Africans and Neanderthals. In fact, Eurasian humans are not hybrids. Neanderthals were hybrids.

[@jasonjudd4]

Holes in the admixture hypothesis. 1. Green shifted the errors until they matched with sapiens. Moving them either direction would have resulted in more Pan like. He admits this on the UCSC channel. 2. No Y chromosome found in Neanderthal. This means that a male Neanderthal could not breed with a female sapiens. 3. If a male sapiens could breed with a female Neanderthal, the offspring would have an EXACT copy of the Neanderthal mother's mtDNA. Since European Cro Magnon did not have ANY Neanderthal mtDNA, the hypothetical interbreeding did not take place there. However, Siberian Cro Magnon did have the minimal 2-6% shared Neanderthal coding 48,000 years ago--for hybridization to occur, this should be a much higher percentage--much higher--like 90%. Not even genetic drift could account for such a loss of mtDNA diversity in a mere 20,000 years. Sapiens, who love to breed, cannot displace 29 mtDNA differences in 180,000 years. How could we lose 202 of the MT differences in just 20k? We can't even with quadrillions of mating successes. 4. Neanderthal Chromosome 2 (nuclear) is not the archaic fusion of 12 & 13 repositioned to # 2. 5. Communication. The severity of this difference would imply a physical rape between the two. No way could a male sapiens rape a robust animal with nearly twice the strength, unless she wanted him to--circles back to hole #2. 6. The hybrid offspring would not survive, nor would it be fertile to carry on the lineage. 7. Genetic zoologists, the people responsible for successful speciated hybridization, also believe that 202 different mtDNA base pairs between two species of the same genus (with identical chromosome count) is not possible. Note: with no Y chromosome, Neanderthal has 48 compared to our 46--this furthers the problem. 8. Body hair. Barefoot footprints found all over the place and accepted as Neanderthal. These prints mean no shoes in the cold. Since extremities freeze before limbs, then this means without shoes, there were no clothes. If they could survive in those conditions without clothes, then they were covered in full body hair. Would a sapiens mate with something hairy? Would a Neanderthal in heat force herself onto a male sapiens? Possible, then we are at problem (hole) number 2. THEN add a half & half sapiens baby in the freezing cold.....? Will not survive. These holes must be filled in order for the hypothesis to be considered theory. Genetic zoologists must also be on board with it too. These 2-6% differences are one of three things. Shared ancestor, merely similar instructional coding plans for bipedalism, or a missing hominid that could mate with both sapiens and Neanderthal should exist--which also means shared ancestor. I have asked these questions to both Paabo and Green. I've been waiting for quite some time.

[@jasonjudd4]

***** Negative. Letters and emails to both.

[@jasonjudd4]

Oogleby, not all of them. The ones issuing journals for review, about it, are all from his original team. Zoological Geneticists don't agree with him. I honestly think there is another species that could mate with both Neander and sapiens, but not the two together. This "X" species would need many strands of rDNA in order to reproduce with two totally different species. Like the genetics of the lemur, which has such diverse nDNA (with unusually large amounts of multiple strands of rDNA). Some very primordial critter. Lemurs are such a diverse species their DNA is the only one that contain different chromosome counts, and separated by thousands of different mitochondrial base pairs, yet can mate successfully. Anomalous in the EvoMod.

[@johannaadams9667]

+Jason Judd Y degrades too quickly to find enough viable material

[@jimagnew1643]

I SURE DON'T MEAN TO HURT ANYONE'S FEELINGS, BUT I HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED WHY WE HAVE ACTORS THAT CAN TALK WITH A ACCENT AND IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE PEOPLE FOR OTHER COUNTRIES, BUT PEOPLE FROM OTHER COUNTRIES CAN NOT SPEAK ENGLISH TO WHERE THEY CAN BE FULLY UNDERSTOOD? ITS A LETDOWN ON OUR PART, I HAVE TRIED SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING THAT HE IS SAYING, I EVEN GO BACK AND TRY AGAIN, HE TALKS SO SOFT, AND HIS WORDS SEEM TO OVERLAP EACH OTHER, BUT I DON'T WANT TO READ THEM EITHER , BECAUSE MOST OF THE TIME THEY PRINT THEM IN A COLOR THAT BLENDS IN TO THE BACKGROUND, ONE PROBLEM IS AS HARD AS THE OTHER, FROM THE BEST THAT I CAN UNDERSTAND, I SOUNDS LIKE HE KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT, I THINK. MAYBE IF HE COULD GET SOMEONE TO TALK FOR HIM, SEEMS LIKE HE IS A GOOD GUY. THANKS. I WILL TRY TO LOOK HIM UP IN THE FUTURE.

[@tinytinky9975]

What did you say? XD