{"id":100538,"date":"2017-09-18T23:26:27","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T07:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/?p=189408"},"modified":"2017-09-18T23:26:27","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T07:26:27","slug":"population-structure-in-neanderthals-leads-to-genetic-homogeneity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2017\/09\/18\/population-structure-in-neanderthals-leads-to-genetic-homogeneity\/","title":{"rendered":"Population structure in Neanderthals leads to genetic homogeneity"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">In France you can find Neanderthals&#8217; tools in your garden, everywhere. A small population is indeed hard to believe.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/b2I2WbLUsL\">https:\/\/t.co\/b2I2WbLUsL<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 David Enard (@DavidEnard) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DavidEnard\/status\/909891098947969025\">September 18, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\nThe above tweet is in response to a <a href=\"'https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/genetics-spills-secrets-from-neanderthals-lost-history-20170918\/&quot;\">article<\/a> which reports on the finding past month in <i>PNAS<\/i>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/114\/37\/9859.full\">Early history of Neanderthals and Denisovans<\/a>. It&#8217;s open access, you should read it. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve reviewed it because I haven&#8217;t dug through the supplements. To be frank this is a paper where you pretty much have to read the supplements because they&#8217;re introducing a somewhat different model here than is the norm.<\/p>\n<p>I talked to Alan Rogers at SMBE about this paper. Broadly, <b>I think there might be something to it, and it&#8217;s because of what David says above.<\/b> It is simply hard to imagine that Neanderthals could be extremely successful with such low genetic diversity as we see, and spread so thin. Now, the <i>Quanta Magazine<\/i> tries to emphasize that the effective population is <b>not<\/b> the true census population, but I wish it would have explained it more clearly. Basically, the size that is relevant for breeding is obviously not going to the same as a head count. And, because effective populations are highly sensitive to bottlenecks you can get really small numbers even when the extant population at any given time may be large.<\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<em>PNAS\u00a0<\/em>paper makes some novel inferences, and I&#8217;ll set that to the side until I read the supplements. But I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s crazy that population structure within Neanderthals could be leading to lower total genetic diversity.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F09%2F18%2F189408%2F&amp;linkname=Population%20structure%20in%20Neanderthals%20leads%20to%20genetic%20homogeneity\" title=\"Facebook\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F09%2F18%2F189408%2F&amp;linkname=Population%20structure%20in%20Neanderthals%20leads%20to%20genetic%20homogeneity\" title=\"Twitter\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_button_google_plus\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/google_plus?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F09%2F18%2F189408%2F&amp;linkname=Population%20structure%20in%20Neanderthals%20leads%20to%20genetic%20homogeneity\" title=\"Google+\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_dd addtoany_share_save\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F09%2F18%2F189408%2F&amp;title=Population%20structure%20in%20Neanderthals%20leads%20to%20genetic%20homogeneity\" data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/2017\/09\/18\/189408\/\" data-a2a-title=\"Population structure in Neanderthals leads to genetic homogeneity\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In France you can find Neanderthals&rsquo; tools in your garden, everywhere. A small population is indeed hard to believe.https:\/\/t.co\/b2I2WbLUsL &mdash; David Enard (@DavidEnard) September 18, 2017 The above tweet is in response to a article which reports on the finding past month in PNAS, Early history of Neanderthals and Denisovans. It&rsquo;s open access, you should [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[481,173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-genetics","category-paleoanthropology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100538"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100539,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100538\/revisions\/100539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}