drmstream[writing]

I, for one, wel­come my Nean­der­tal ancestry.

It may not sound like a lot — between 1 and 4 per­cent. But that’s the equiv­a­lent of one great-great-great grandparent’s DNA con­tri­bu­tion. In the case of the Nean­der­tal con­tri­bu­tion, more than 1500 gen­er­a­tions ago, it’s an endur­ing legacy of an ancient group of peo­ple, spread across many lines of the genealo­gies of liv­ing peo­ple. Beyond their genealog­i­cal inter­est, Nean­der­tal genes might have made a big dif­fer­ence to our evo­lu­tion­ary potential.

Think that the idea of man being related to mon­keys makes some people’s heads spin? How are they going to man­age the idea of hav­ing a bunch of sav­age ances­tors?

This blog post from John Hawks gives one of the clearer gen­eral sum­maries of a research paper that traces our genetic cross-over with our Nean­der­tal ances­tors. (You’ll find the research embed­ded all over the web. For instance, here’s econ­o­mist Mark Thoma’s refresh­ing free asso­ci­a­tion between the Nean­der­tal research and chal­lenges in the study of economics.)

Which way have the genes prop­a­gated? What activ­i­ties occurred, between who? We’re like a fam­ily that starts trad­ing sto­ries about a dis­tant cousin. The scan­dals are tit­il­lat­ing and strangely recognizable.

The nature of man isn’t pure. There is no pre-cut mold, per­fect model, sta­tic image. The poten­tial of man is a work build on the shoul­ders of oth­ers. It can’t be achieved alone. There is no per­fec­tion, only ideals. Our sense of self is an eddy in the end­less stream of mankind.

If 1% of our genes are shared with some nean­der­tal ances­tor, then some 1% of us will be shared some 300,000 years hence. We’re just in a moment.