Neanderthals “Didn’t Truly Go Extinct”

One scientist shares that this new study “really highlights that what we think as a separate Neanderthal lineage really was more interconnected with our ancestors.” So much so that they argue that our supposed evolutionary cousins didn’t really go extinct:

Neanderthals may not have truly gone extinct but instead may have been absorbed into the modern human population. That’s one of the implications of a new study, which finds modern human DNA may have made up 2.5% to 3.7% of the Neanderthal genome. . . .

That is akin to 1 in 30 modern human parents in the ancestral Neanderthal population.

Now, we’ve known for a while that “the genomes of modern human groups outside Africa contain about 1% to 2% of Neanderthal DNA,” but this new study attempted to discover, using three Neanderthal genomes, how much of our DNA was present in theirs.

Of course, we have to understand the assumptions involved in this study (long ages and evolutionary ancestry, for example) as well as the extremely small sample size (three genomes which likely are not complete given the degradation of DNA over time). It’s really a mixture of observational science (our genomes in the present) and historical science (interpreting Neanderthal DNA and our relationship to them).

The overall conclusion of this study is what we’d expect—“modern man” and Neanderthals share many gene variants because both were fully human!

But the overall conclusion of this study is what we’d expect—“modern man” and Neanderthals share many gene variants because both were fully human! Both were descended from the same human couple and through the same family (Noah’s). Neanderthals were people living in a very difficult, post-flood world who had some genetic diversity that has since largely been lost. They aren’t some great mystery; they were members of the one human race—Adam’s race—who lived just a few thousand years ago.

I remember going to secular museums many years ago and seeing Neanderthals exhibited as primitive brutes who were much lower than modern man on the evolutionary scale. But now we know that’s not true. Just another example of evolutionists having to change their minds!!!

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This item was discussed Monday on Answers News with cohosts Dr. Tim Chaffey, Kevin Hadsall, and Rob Webb. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum, broadcast on our Answers in Genesis YouTube channel, and posted to Answers TV. We also covered the following topics:

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Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.