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submitted 3 days ago by Subject6051@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Ok, I am not supporting bestiality here. But, I just came to know about a Dogxim, a dog fox hybrid and I had known for a long time that horses and donkeys can breed (to produce a mule). So, I was just curious, can humans breed with any other animals closely related to us?

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[-] theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago

Not since the Neanderthals left us

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

"Why do they keep yelling ungabunga with a persistant erection every time we hang out? Fuck this I'm out."

space ship flies away

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 14 points 2 days ago

Neanderthals didn’t leave us; they merged with us. Neanderthal DNA is well represented in our current population.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, but not their whole genome, and never at more then a few percent of the total modern human genome. It's more like a remnant.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago

How could it be less than their whole genome? Is more neanderthal dna lost than homo sapiens dna when the two mate somehow?

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You, if you have non-African roots, have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. Roughly, we can say that means you can take a slice of unrelated ancestors way back that's 1-4% Neanderthals. Each of their kids had 50% of the Neanderthal genome, and, assuming the next incoming ancestor was fully Homo Sapiens, had grandkids with only 25% of the neanderthal genome.

Since there's a lot of people and a lot of interbreeding events, you'd naively expect it to be a completely different 50% every time, and collectively contain most or all of the whole thing. However, not every Neanderthal allele is equally likely to be passed down, so that's not actually what happens.

I don't know how much of it actually remains across the human population exactly, but I do know parts of the X chromosome are complete deserts of Neanderthal DNA, at the very least. Like I went into elsewhere in the thread, that's a pattern that indicates having Neanderthal admixture there causes sterility, and so male offspring with only one copy of the chromosome don't reproduce, and don't appear as an ancestor of yours. Those segments of the Neanderthal X chromosome are gone in living populations.

Edit: Reading what you wrote again, I think the detail you might be missing is just that lots of people die with no descendants, and the carrying capacity of ice-age Europe was finite. It's not like the two lines just fused together without a change in size; the mostly-human population slowly grew and the mostly-Neanderthal population slowly shrunk over a few millennia.

It's not known why, or how exactly that went down. It could be a reproductive quirk, or just humans being slightly better somehow. It's probably wasn't organised genocide, though, for quite a number of reasons.

[-] Subject6051@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 days ago

That's absolutely preposterous, I am still alive and my friends say I am one of them Neanderthals

[-] Catsrules@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

Hey maybe we broke up with them. We don't know.

[-] Dragonfruit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 days ago

Maybe there still are neanderthals but they're just really good at hiding and are plotting to overthrow humanity

[-] theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Keep talking like that and you too can become the Vice President's favorite philosopher

[-] Bluetreefrog@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
144 points (88.7% liked)

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