John Hawks responds to the new paper in PNAS, Close correspondence between quantitative and molecular-genetic divergence times for Neandertals and modern humans.
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This is more for google, but if you missed anything, you should check it out. Here is a replay of the introgression & Neandertal related posts....
Preview:
Neandertal & H. sapiens sapiens interbreeding
Neandertal-"modern" mixing
Introgression related posts over the past 6 months
Main course…
Update II: John Hawks leaves a comment.
Update: Kambiz has much more comment.
Were neandertal and modern human cranial differences produced by natural selection or genetic drift?:
... Here we use a variety of statistical tests founded on explicit predictions from quantitative- and population-…
Here is a press release of a paper which reviews Neandertal mtDNA diversity. Here is the first paragraph:
The cohabitation of Neandertals and modern humans in Europe about 35,000 years ago has stimulated considerable debate regarding hypothetical admixture. Recently, sequences of the…
Update III: John Hawks comments.
Update II: Here is the paper. The abstract:
A common assumption in the evolutionary scenario of the first Eurasian hominin populations is that they all had an African origin. This assumption also seems to apply for the Early and Middle Pleistocene populations, whose…
I don't have the paper in front of me and I only very briefly skimmed it, so I could be talking complete and utter crap here. However, I don't usually let that stop me, so......
John writes:
But their analysis assumes that genetic drift accounts for all changes. I don't deny the role of genetic drift, but I do deny that it explains much about recent skeletal evolution in humans. Random chance cannot do much in a very large population in a few hundred generations.
Yet in the conclusion to the paper, Weaver et al say:
Brain size relative to body size appears to have increased in both the Neandertal and the modern human lineages (56, 57). These parallel trajectories may indicate that directional natural selection was acting on both lineages independently, resulting in differently shaped but similarly sized brain cases (58). To the extent that the measurements considered here reflect these changes, our results would imply that although natural selection may have produced the similarities in size, genetic drift lead to the differences in shape. We are not arguing that natural selection had no effect, just that it appears not to have played a dominant role in producing differences.