The evolving story of human evolution | Melanie Chang | TEDxVictoria

Neanderthals are an archaic human species that went extinct only 30.000 years ago wile humans emerged only 200.000 years ago. Thus, it is reasonable that one might expect humans and neanderthals coexisted in both time and space. In fact, we have archeological evidence that indicates that we overlapped and that we could have met face to face. We are able to find such evidence in Europeans and Asians DNA, as it contains approximately 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA. This indicates that mating between our species and neanderthal was possible.

Paleoanthropologists are tasked with the mission of reconstructing our evolutionary past and events but the amount of data is a small fraction of the total story of our evolutionary history. Neanderthals were the first fossil humans known and discovered in the 19th century. At this time it wasn't possible to sequence DNA but 150 years later when Neanderthal DNA was sequenced, they were excluded from modern human ancestry because they were far too different from human DNA sequences. Consequently many scientists thought that we could never have interbred with Neanderthals. Nevertheless this studies on neanderthal DNA were based on mitochondrial DNA.Years later, major technological advances allowed us to obtain nuclear DNA that matched with some parts of our genome (btw 1-4%) sustaining the possibility of breeding between the two species. This inconclusivity between nuclear and mitochondrial DNA is often part of scientific approaches and thus more studies need to be done on this topic.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLXPi0Jha5o