Did early humans ever have sex with Neanderthals? And most importantly, did they ever have children? Probably not, say German researchers using a new DNA analysis. They found that human DNA on Neanderthal bones—supposed evidence of intensive inter-species interbreeding—did not end up on the fossils until they were excavated.
When you look at a picture of a Neanderthal today, you probably don't immediately think of sex. But then again, tastes differ and the ideal of beauty changes every fifty years. So it's not a silly question whether our ancestors might have thought about sex when they saw Neanderthals, a now extinct human species. An even more important question:did they have offspring? That could have influenced the evolution of man, or the extinction of the Neanderthal.
There is a lot of fuss about this among scientists. Erik Trinkaus of the American University of St. Louis has found oddly shaped skulls in the past and thinks they belonged to hybrid offspring born of sex between humans and Neanderthals. This remark is repulsed by many archaeologists. But in 2003, Trinkaus even came up with DNA evidence:the fossils he found contain a good mix of human and Neanderthal DNA. It was inevitable that people had to have sex with Neanderthals and had hybrid babies from them.
Svante Pääbo is a researcher who thinks humans did indeed have sex with Neanderthals, but doesn't believe in mixed offspring. And he now has new evidence for that. According to Pääbo, the human DNA that Trinkaus found on Neanderthal bones simply ended up during the dig. Pääbo shows this with a new DNA test in the professional journal Current Biology.
The DNA test is able to distinguish very short pieces of DNA from longer ones. That is important, because DNA that is 30,000 years old can often be found fragmented. Fresh DNA, which people wear on their own fingers after poking their noses, for example, consists of much longer pieces.
Pääbo performed the DNA test on a Neanderthal he found with colleagues in Kostenski in Russia. This Neanderthal also initially seemed to contain part of human DNA. But when Pääbo measured the length of the pieces of DNA with the new DNA test, he found that almost all the long pieces were human DNA, and the short, old, and fragmented pieces must indeed be Neanderthal DNA. The human DNA was therefore new and probably only ended up on the bones during excavation, when the archaeologists touched the bones.
The human DNA that Trinkaus found probably ended up on his Neanderthal in the same way. Who knows, it may even be his own DNA.
DNA tests were not so precise a few years ago:it was difficult to determine whether a DNA code now consisted of several small or a few large chunks. Pääbo notes in a press release that just a year ago, he thought he could only detect human contamination on Neanderthal bones by taking DNA samples from everyone involved in the dig — an impossible task that makes no sense if you even do it. one person is missing.
Fuss about sex with Neanderthals aside:Pääbo's find is useful for future archaeology anyway. When an archaeologist wants to perform a DNA test, he can now check whether the DNA he finds is really old. Pääbo himself still wants to know how humans and Neanderthals differed from each other externally and internally, and is therefore continuing with DNA research.
- Neanderthal (Wikipedia)
- Neanderthals had sex with modern humans (NU.nl)
- Oldest new European (VPRO's Noorderlicht)
- Neanderthals also had large brains (Knowledge link article)
- Neanderthalers.nl (Dutch website about Neanderthals)