Unearthed within the limestone quarries that lie east of Dusseldorf in Germany, the ﬁrst fossil to be recognized as an ancient hominin brought solid evidence to the table for starting to ﬁnd answers to the question of where humans came from

Corrow, Hannah

English

UNH Scholars' Repository

SpectrumSpring 2018 Article 25-1-2018Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal InterbreedingHannah CorrowUniversity of New Hampshire, DurhamFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrumThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Journals and Publications at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository.It has been accepted for inclusion in Spectrum by an authorized editor of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information,please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationCorrow, Hannah (2018) "Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding," Spectrum: Vol. 7 : Iss. 1 ,Article 2.Available at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol7/iss1/210/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Artshttps://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 1/4College of Liberal ArtsDepartment of Anthropology Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look atHuman/Neandertal Interbreedingby Hannah CorrowMay, 2018Unearthed within the limestone quarries that lie east of Dusseldorf in Germany, the ﬁrst fossil to be recognized as an ancienthominin brought solid evidence to the table for starting to ﬁnd answers to the question of where humans came from.The fossil—known as Neanderthal l—has since been classiﬁed as Homo neanderthalensis, named for the location of its discoveryin the Neander Valley (that being the spelling of the German word for ‘valley’ prior to the German orthography reform). Prior tothe discovery in 1856, the subjects of human origins and evolution were no strangers to science. Charles Darwin published hismost famous work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859—three years a er the discovery of Neanderthal 1, though his hypothesis ofnatural selection had been conceived much earlier (and even simultaneously ‘discovered’ by Alfred Russel Wallace).Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos gives a ﬁctional example of how speciation can occur over time once speciﬁc traits areexempliﬁed over the course of the evolutionary process. In the book, through a case of genetic mutation and a signiﬁcant degreeof genetic inﬂuence from the (somewhat) apocalypse-induced founder e ect—the seeds for the genetic future of all humandescendants are sown.Vonnegut’s novel shows an extreme and isolated case of how natural selection and genetic variation can inﬂuence the future of aspecies, but this process is not something unfamiliar to anatomically modem humans—as it has inﬂuenced the predecessors ofthe current implementation of our species and our now-extinct cousins for millions of years.The passengers of the Bahia dc Darwin, swept away to an isolated island of the Galapagos-—mirror, in a sense, the journey of ourmost recently extinct human cousins—the Neandertals. Hominid fossils from earlier than [.8 million years old have not been founoutside of Africa to date (Ho ecker, 21). Some of the oldest fossil hominids found outside of Africa, in Europe and the Middle East—belong to the species of Homo known as Homo heidelbergensis. Named for the city of Heidelberg in Germany—nearby to thesite of the ﬁrst H. heidelbergensis fossil’s discovery in 1907, this species is estimated to have lived roughly 600,000 to 200,000years ago—and is widely agreed upon as the likely common ancestor for anatomically modern humans, Neandertals andDenisovians.Support for this hypothesis is found in the estimation that modern humans and Neandertals diverged genetically around 690,000and 500,000 years ago (Ho ecker, 49)——the idea being that the populations of H. heidelbergensis migrating through the MiddleEast and Europe, evolving over hundreds of thousands of years, accounts for the ﬁrst “out of Africa” wave that resulted in thespeciation into what we know as Neandertals.While Neandertal predecessors were speciating out in Western Europe, the remaining H. heidelbergensis populations le  on theAfrican continent evolved separately into the ﬁrst groups of anatomically modern humans—some of which would eventually1Corrow: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal InterbPublished by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 201810/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Artshttps://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 2/4make a similar migration though the Middle East and Europe in a separate “out of Africa”.  A er the relatively recent study in 2010by the Max Planck Institute proved that Neandertals and anatomically modern humans had indeed interbred—the question ofwhether these two species of humans were ever contemporary to each other within the same environment was ﬁnally able to beput to rest.Still, with this initial sequencing of the Neandertal genome in 2010—more questions were brought along with the ﬁndings of thestudy. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology concluded that in anatomically modern humanswith ancestry from outside of Africa, there was the potential to have up to two percent of DNA from the up to four billion basepairs within the Neandertal genome (Green, et al., 2). This initial study, that used the DNA from three female Neandertalindividuals compared to the DNA of ﬁve present day humans (Green, et al., 3), though a remarkably small data pool—managed toreveal a great amount about human origins and proved that anatomically modern humans and Neandertals interbred.Though they do not o en occur in the wild, hybrid animals are not unfamiliar to humans—and many only exist as the result ofhuman meddling in the breeding of creatures raised in captivity. A hybrid is technically deﬁned as “an organism resulting fromfertilization of the egg of one species with the sperm of another,” (Bonnicksen, 59)—as such, though few instances occur in thewild, some of the complications that arise in the hybrid o spring created by the whims of humans can shed some light on some othe perceived complications that would have hindered the reproduction between Neandertals and anatomically modern humansOne hybrid animal most famously ‘engineered’ though breeding in captivity is the liger, the product of a male lion and a femaletiger (and less commonly, the tigon—the product of a female lion and a male tiger). The breeding of ligers and tigons is hinderedby a number of complications from the millions of years of evolution that these two species, and many attempts to produce oneare unable to survive to term. Putting these cases—and the slew of health problems a licting hybrid animals aside to us on thefew that manage to survive to sexual maturity—brings up the topic of hybrid o spring: sterility.All male ligers are sterile—a result of incompatible Y—chromosomes. While female ligers can bear o spring, it is not an occurrencfrequent enough to be studied—much less enough to cultivate the speciation in a population. These modem-day hybrids, while aresult of human tampering, can still give a rough idea of issues that might have caused complications in the pairings betweenanatomically modern humans and Neandertals—though with a point of divergence of roughly 500,000 years prior instead of abou7 million. A report published in The American Journal of Human Genetics in 2016 concluded that the Y chromosome from the DNAof the 49,000 year old male Neandertal found at El Sidron, Spain—“diverged from those of modern humans” (Mendez et al.,online). Succinctly put in Ann Gibbons review of the report for Science Magazine, “though male Neandertals and female modernhumans probably hooked up more than once over the ages, they may have been unable to produce many healthy male babies.”(Gibbons, online). The many discoveries over just the last decade in the ﬁeld on human origins have raised more questions thanthey have answered—namely raising the issue of whether Neandertals should be considered a sub-species of H. sapiens (thus,sometimes referred to as H. sapiens neanderthalensis).This revision would make better sense from an evolutionary standpoint, as hybridization between sub-species in the wild is morecommon—especially in times of environmental instability, such as climate change (Actman, online). This occurrence today lendsto some interesting implications of the nature of anatomically modern human-Neandertal relations during their contemporaryyears (the topic of which will have to be le  for further speculation in future research, hopefully).These scientiﬁc revelations have proven that many humans alive today may be distant descendants of hybrid o spring—but thefact that Neandertal DNA exists in modern humans brings to mind more questions than answers. Neandertals, though notsurviving as their own species—were not entirely lost to evolution. To current knowledge, at least some Neandertal individualsfulﬁlled their evolutionary goal of ensuring the passing-on of their genes. We—as humans, as scientists, and so on—have an ideaof at least the basic logistics of where these hybrid ancestors ﬁt into the human story, but it is still developing.2Spectrum, Vol. 7 [2018], Iss. 1, Art. 2https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol7/iss1/210/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Artshttps://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 3/4Perhaps, if we are lucky—more light can be shed on the nature of these relationships, and the interactions between populationsof anatomically modem humans and their contemporary Neandertal cousins.Works CitedActman, J. (2017). “Cat Experts: Ligers and Other Designer Hybrids Pointless and Unethical” (online), National Geographic SocietyBonnicksen, A.  (2009). Hybrids.  In Chimeras, Hybrids, and Interspecies Research: Politics and Policymaking (pp. 59-76). Washington, D.C., USA. Georgetown University Press.Gibbons, A. (2016). “Modern human females and male Neandertals had trouble making babies. Here’s why." (online), Science |AAAS.Green, R. E., et al. (2010) “The Neandertal in us.” (online), Max Planck Society. Mendez, F. L., et al. (2016). “The Divergence ofNeandertal and Modem Human Y Chromosomes” (online), American Society of Human Genetics.Works ConsultedBahrami, B. (2017). Cafe Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places. Berkeley, CA: CounterpointPress.Finlayson, C. (.2009). Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived. Oxford, UK: Oxford UniversityPress.Gibbons, A. (2017). “Modern Humans Lost DNA When They Le  Africa-but Mating with Neandertals Brought Some Back.” (onlinearticle), Science | AAAS.Gould, S. Jay (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Papagianni, D., Morse, et a1. (2013). The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story. London, UK:Thames & Hudson.Pyne, L. V. (2016).  Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils.  New York City, NY: Viking Press.Shreeve, J.  (1998). The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, Austin, TX: Bard Press.Stringer, C. (2013). Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth. New York City, NY: St. Martin's Gri m Press.Tattersall, I., Schwartz J. H. (2008) Extinct Humans. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thompson, L. (2010). “2010 Release: CompleteNeanderthal Genome Sequenced.” (online), National Human Genome Research Institute.Trinkaus, E., Shipman,  P . (1993). Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind, New York City, NY: Random House. Return to Spectrum Issue 7 homepage3Corrow: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal InterbPublished by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 201810/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Artshttps://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 4/4Department of Anthropology  | Phone (603) 862-1864 | Fax (603) 862-1131310 Huddleston Hall | 73 Main Street | Durham, NH 03824College of Liberal Arts  •  603-862-2062 Murkland Hall, Durham, N.H.  •  03824 Contact  •  ApplyThis website is managed by Susan Dumais.Copyright © 2018  •  TTY Users: 7-1-1 or 800-735-2964 (Relay NH) USNH Privacy Policies  •  USNH Terms of Use  •  ADA Acknowledgement4Spectrum, Vol. 7 [2018], Iss. 1, Art. 2https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol7/iss1/2

Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding

University of New Hampshire

Spectrum
Spring 2018 Article 2
5-1-2018
Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/
Neandertal Interbreeding
Hannah Corrow
University of New Hampshire, Durham
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Journals and Publications at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository.
It has been accepted for inclusion in Spectrum by an authorized editor of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information,
please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.
Recommended Citation
Corrow, Hannah (2018) "Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding," Spectrum: Vol. 7 : Iss. 1 ,
Article 2.
Available at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol7/iss1/2
10/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Arts
https://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 1/4
College of Liberal Arts
Department of Anthropology 
Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at
Human/Neandertal Interbreeding
by Hannah Corrow
May, 2018
Unearthed within the limestone quarries that lie east of Dusseldorf in Germany, the first fossil to be recognized as an ancient
hominin brought solid evidence to the table for starting to find answers to the question of where humans came from.
The fossil—known as Neanderthal l—has since been classified as Homo neanderthalensis, named for the location of its discovery
in the Neander Valley (that being the spelling of the German word for ‘valley’ prior to the German orthography reform). Prior to
the discovery in 1856, the subjects of human origins and evolution were no strangers to science. Charles Darwin published his
most famous work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859—three years a er the discovery of Neanderthal 1, though his hypothesis of
natural selection had been conceived much earlier (and even simultaneously ‘discovered’ by Alfred Russel Wallace).
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos gives a fictional example of how speciation can occur over time once specific traits are
exemplified over the course of the evolutionary process. In the book, through a case of genetic mutation and a significant degree
of genetic influence from the (somewhat) apocalypse-induced founder e ect—the seeds for the genetic future of all human
descendants are sown.
Vonnegut’s novel shows an extreme and isolated case of how natural selection and genetic variation can influence the future of a
species, but this process is not something unfamiliar to anatomically modem humans—as it has influenced the predecessors of
the current implementation of our species and our now-extinct cousins for millions of years.
The passengers of the Bahia dc Darwin, swept away to an isolated island of the Galapagos-—mirror, in a sense, the journey of our
most recently extinct human cousins—the Neandertals. Hominid fossils from earlier than [.8 million years old have not been foun
outside of Africa to date (Ho ecker, 21). Some of the oldest fossil hominids found outside of Africa, in Europe and the Middle East
—belong to the species of Homo known as Homo heidelbergensis. Named for the city of Heidelberg in Germany—nearby to the
site of the first H. heidelbergensis fossil’s discovery in 1907, this species is estimated to have lived roughly 600,000 to 200,000
years ago—and is widely agreed upon as the likely common ancestor for anatomically modern humans, Neandertals and
Denisovians.
Support for this hypothesis is found in the estimation that modern humans and Neandertals diverged genetically around 690,000
and 500,000 years ago (Ho ecker, 49)——the idea being that the populations of H. heidelbergensis migrating through the Middle
East and Europe, evolving over hundreds of thousands of years, accounts for the first “out of Africa” wave that resulted in the
speciation into what we know as Neandertals.
While Neandertal predecessors were speciating out in Western Europe, the remaining H. heidelbergensis populations le  on the
African continent evolved separately into the first groups of anatomically modern humans—some of which would eventually
1
Corrow: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interb
Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2018
10/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Arts
https://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 2/4
make a similar migration though the Middle East and Europe in a separate “out of Africa”.  A er the relatively recent study in 2010
by the Max Planck Institute proved that Neandertals and anatomically modern humans had indeed interbred—the question of
whether these two species of humans were ever contemporary to each other within the same environment was finally able to be
put to rest.
Still, with this initial sequencing of the Neandertal genome in 2010—more questions were brought along with the findings of the
study. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology concluded that in anatomically modern humans
with ancestry from outside of Africa, there was the potential to have up to two percent of DNA from the up to four billion base
pairs within the Neandertal genome (Green, et al., 2). This initial study, that used the DNA from three female Neandertal
individuals compared to the DNA of five present day humans (Green, et al., 3), though a remarkably small data pool—managed to
reveal a great amount about human origins and proved that anatomically modern humans and Neandertals interbred.
Though they do not o en occur in the wild, hybrid animals are not unfamiliar to humans—and many only exist as the result of
human meddling in the breeding of creatures raised in captivity. A hybrid is technically defined as “an organism resulting from
fertilization of the egg of one species with the sperm of another,” (Bonnicksen, 59)—as such, though few instances occur in the
wild, some of the complications that arise in the hybrid o spring created by the whims of humans can shed some light on some o
the perceived complications that would have hindered the reproduction between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans
One hybrid animal most famously ‘engineered’ though breeding in captivity is the liger, the product of a male lion and a female
tiger (and less commonly, the tigon—the product of a female lion and a male tiger). The breeding of ligers and tigons is hindered
by a number of complications from the millions of years of evolution that these two species, and many attempts to produce one
are unable to survive to term. Putting these cases—and the slew of health problems a licting hybrid animals aside to us on the
few that manage to survive to sexual maturity—brings up the topic of hybrid o spring: sterility.
All male ligers are sterile—a result of incompatible Y—chromosomes. While female ligers can bear o spring, it is not an occurrenc
frequent enough to be studied—much less enough to cultivate the speciation in a population. These modem-day hybrids, while a
result of human tampering, can still give a rough idea of issues that might have caused complications in the pairings between
anatomically modern humans and Neandertals—though with a point of divergence of roughly 500,000 years prior instead of abou
7 million. A report published in The American Journal of Human Genetics in 2016 concluded that the Y chromosome from the DNA
of the 49,000 year old male Neandertal found at El Sidron, Spain—“diverged from those of modern humans” (Mendez et al.,
online). Succinctly put in Ann Gibbons review of the report for Science Magazine, “though male Neandertals and female modern
humans probably hooked up more than once over the ages, they may have been unable to produce many healthy male babies.”
(Gibbons, online). The many discoveries over just the last decade in the field on human origins have raised more questions than
they have answered—namely raising the issue of whether Neandertals should be considered a sub-species of H. sapiens (thus,
sometimes referred to as H. sapiens neanderthalensis).
This revision would make better sense from an evolutionary standpoint, as hybridization between sub-species in the wild is more
common—especially in times of environmental instability, such as climate change (Actman, online). This occurrence today lends
to some interesting implications of the nature of anatomically modern human-Neandertal relations during their contemporary
years (the topic of which will have to be le  for further speculation in future research, hopefully).
These scientific revelations have proven that many humans alive today may be distant descendants of hybrid o spring—but the
fact that Neandertal DNA exists in modern humans brings to mind more questions than answers. Neandertals, though not
surviving as their own species—were not entirely lost to evolution. To current knowledge, at least some Neandertal individuals
fulfilled their evolutionary goal of ensuring the passing-on of their genes. We—as humans, as scientists, and so on—have an idea
of at least the basic logistics of where these hybrid ancestors fit into the human story, but it is still developing.
2
Spectrum, Vol. 7 [2018], Iss. 1, Art. 2
https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol7/iss1/2
10/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Arts
https://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 3/4
Perhaps, if we are lucky—more light can be shed on the nature of these relationships, and the interactions between populations
of anatomically modem humans and their contemporary Neandertal cousins.
Works Cited
Actman, J. (2017). “Cat Experts: Ligers and Other Designer Hybrids Pointless and Unethical” (online), National Geographic Society
Bonnicksen, A.  (2009). Hybrids.  In Chimeras, Hybrids, and Interspecies Research: Politics and Policymaking (pp. 59-76). 
Washington, D.C., USA. Georgetown University Press.
Gibbons, A. (2016). “Modern human females and male Neandertals had trouble making babies. Here’s why." (online), Science |
AAAS.
Green, R. E., et al. (2010) “The Neandertal in us.” (online), Max Planck Society. Mendez, F. L., et al. (2016). “The Divergence of
Neandertal and Modem Human Y Chromosomes” (online), American Society of Human Genetics.
Works Consulted
Bahrami, B. (2017). Cafe Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint
Press.
Finlayson, C. (.2009). Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Gibbons, A. (2017). “Modern Humans Lost DNA When They Le  Africa-but Mating with Neandertals Brought Some Back.” (online
article), Science | AAAS.
Gould, S. Jay (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Papagianni, D., Morse, et a1. (2013). The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story. London, UK:
Thames & Hudson.
Pyne, L. V. (2016).  Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils.  New York City, NY: Viking Press.
Shreeve, J.  (1998). The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins, Austin, TX: Bard Press.
Stringer, C. (2013). Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth. New York City, NY: St. Martin's Gri m Press.
Tattersall, I., Schwartz J. H. (2008) Extinct Humans. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thompson, L. (2010). “2010 Release: Complete
Neanderthal Genome Sequenced.” (online), National Human Genome Research Institute.
Trinkaus, E., Shipman,  P . (1993). Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind, New York City, NY: Random House.
 
Return to Spectrum Issue 7 homepage
3
Corrow: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interb
Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2018
10/8/2018 Anthropology: Notes on the Idea of a Species: A Look at Human/Neandertal Interbreeding | College of Liberal Arts
https://cola.unh.edu/anthropology/notes-idea-species-look-humanneandertal-interbreeding 4/4
Department of Anthropology  | Phone (603) 862-1864 | Fax (603) 862-1131
310 Huddleston Hall | 73 Main Street | Durham, NH 03824
College of Liberal Arts  •  603-862-2062 
Murkland Hall, Durham, N.H.  •  03824 
Contact  •  Apply
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Copyright © 2018  •  TTY Users: 7-1-1 or 800-735-2964 (Relay NH) 
USNH Privacy Policies  •  USNH Terms of Use  •  ADA Acknowledgement
4
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