Silk: I mean anythig, as usual, is possible.
Point in case.. Sickle cell anemia (other anemias ect.
et al) pecularial to Negroes.


Did Neanderthals and modern humans get it together?
Hybrid fossils in Romania add to story of ancient
human pairings.
Kerri Smith

This skull, from a Romanian cave, shows signs of both
Neanderthal and
modern man.


The idea that Neanderthals and early humans living in
Europe may have
interbred has been strengthened by a re-analysis of
bones unearthed
in a Romanian cave more than 50 years ago.

The bones show a mixture of modern human and
Neanderthal features,
leading researchers to suggest that the two groups
could have
intermixed and produced offspring.

The fossils include parts of a skull and jaw, and a
shoulder blade.
Although they mainly resembled modern humans, with a
narrow nose and
small brow bones, for example, the remains also showed
other features
normally associated with Neanderthals - a pronounced
bump on the back
of the skull, and a distinctive lower jaw bone.

"Modern humans met, intermixed with, and interbred
with Neanderthals
across Europe," says Erik Trinkaus of Washington
University in St
Loius, Missouri, whose team reports the findings this
week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. "The
evidence from
the fossils is one more piece in this puzzle."

Previous hybrids (or possible hybrids) have similarly
been found by
Trinkaus in Portugal and the Czech Republic2,3. The
more such samples
that are discovered, he notes, the more solid the idea
that the
species intermixed.

Messy history

Recent finds have hammered home the fact that
Neanderthals and modern
man lived in many pockets of shared habitat for
thousands of years.
Before 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals were alone on
the European
continent. But 20,000 years later, most European
inhabitants were
modern humans. The interim is an "absolute mess", says
Clive
Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum, who studies this
time in history
(see 'Neanderthal' s last stand').

There remains debate about whether the two warred,
lived peacefully
side-by-side, or even mated. It is also not clear
whether their
offspring would have been fertile, or sterile like a
mule. Trinkaus,
however, is convinced that the two were producing
fully functioning
offspring.

One thorn in this theory's side is the burgeoning
amount of evidence
from Neanderthal DNA. The sequences analysed so far
suggest that no
genetic mixing between Neanderthal and modern-human
populations went
on - lending weight to the idea that Neanderthals were
replaced by
modern humans as they swept through Europe, giving
them no
opportunity to swap genes.

Another unsolved puzzle is that virtually no European
fossils older
than 30,000 years resemble pure modern humans. "If
we've got
Neanderthals and modern people and they're
hybridizing, why is it
that all we find are Neanderthals and hybrids?" asks
Finlayson. "Where are the other guys?"

Trinkaus and his colleagues characterized the bones,
which were
discovered in the Pestera Muierii cave of southern
Romania, and
radiocarbon dated them to pinpoint their age. They
found them to be
30,000 years old. This slots in nicely with the theory
that hybrids
were formed while both Neanderthals and modern man
shared European
territory.

"The most important part is that it shows that when
these people met,
they saw each other as physically and socially
appropriate mates,"
says Trinkaus. "And they got it together."





________________________________________________________________________________\
__________
Check out the New Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things
done faster.
(http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta)