ashes of Neanderthal knocks on our hearts

[Dilara]

Quite recently Svante Pääbo director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute said “It is still unclear exactly how much of the complete Neanderthal genome exists today in people, but it seems to approach something like 40 percent.”
But 10-15 years ago the hypothesis of neanderthals being involved in making modern people was considered by most of the scholars as ridiculous. They believed that time all modern humans to descend from one person "chromosomal adam" - a pure sapiens.
I've just found this - where is that beautiful man on this tree I wonder?

[CharonY]

It seems that you may misunderstand the concept of Y-chromosomal Adam. It taps into the concept of most recent common ancestor of today's population and not that of modern humans. If you move back the timeline in human ancestry, the Y-chromsomal Adam will be shifted back, too. That being said, while the concept of interbreeding was controversial, I do not think that most scholars would have thought it to be ridiculous. For the longest time, there was simply no evidence. However, at least since 2002 there have been fossil findings that have been used to support the notion of interbreeding (see e.g. Trinkaus et al PNAS 2003 100:20). So the idea has been kicking around for a while before that.

[Dilara]

It taps into the concept of most recent common ancestor of today's population and not that of modern humans. If you move back the timeline in human ancestry, the Y-chromsomal Adam will be shifted back, too.

I comprehend "Adam" t as our common grand-grand-grand-Father - the unique and particular person on the time scale. Am I wrong?

But this "common father" exists only if we take divergence as the only principle possible to describe the origin of the humans. Now I see that geneticists accepted the opposite concept: humankind is product of complicated hybridization. So "Adam" stopped to exist. Similar trends go in the linguistics. The linguists declined the former concept of Finno-Ugric identity because of terrible mess in calculating its common linguistic ancestor

[overtone]

But this "common father" exists only if we take divergence as the only principle possible to describe the origin of the humans. Now I see that geneticists accepted the opposite concept: humankind is product of complicated hybridization.

Hybridization with Neandertal people just means the common male ancestor was common to whatever y-chromosome lineage of Neandertals contributed Y-chormosome genetic material to the extant sapiens gene pool. If any.

 

 

 

Similar trends go in the linguistics. The linguists declined the former concept of Finno-Ugric identity because of terrible mess in calculating its common linguistic ancestor

Linguistic evolution is not necessarily Darwinian, and language does not speciate. Edited November 17, 2015 by overtone