Evolution and humans: Neanderthal contributions (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, August 30, 2019, 02:35 (1911 days ago) @ David Turell

The preceding article listed contributions made by Denisovans (high altitude tolerance) and Neanderthals (enhanced immunty) that benefited current humans. This article coveys the description of all the migrations and interbreeding that seems to have occurred and contributed to what makes current humans as they are:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/fossil-dna-reveals-new-twists-in-modern-human-origins-20...

"Genomic studies reveal how convoluted the emergence of modern humans was. We carry genes from our ancestors’ encounters with ancient people like the Neanderthals, but the Neanderthals already carried some modern human genes from even earlier encounters with vanished groups.
Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

"Humans today are mosaics, our genomes rich tapestries of interwoven ancestries. With every fossil discovered, with every DNA analysis performed, the story gets more complex: We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo, harbor genetic fragments from other closely related but long-extinct lineages. Modern humans are the products of a sprawling history of shifts and dispersals, separations and reunions — a history characterized by far more diversity, movement and mixture than seemed imaginable a mere decade ago.

***

"Now the DNA evidence seems to back up this revised migration narrative as well. In retrospect, “it seems quite natural,” Scally said, “to say that human populations and evolution were just as messy 200,000 years ago, and just as subdivided and structured … as they are today.”

“It makes it hard to argue that there was ever some … special evolutionary event or genetic event that triggered the evolution of humans as we know them,” he added. Humans have been continuously evolving through the mixing of varied populations for hundreds of thousands of years. (In fact, Scally posits that our species did not originally evolve from a single population in Africa, but rather from many interconnected populations spread out across the continent.)

“'This is telling us, ‘Oh, this is not a weird one-off,’” Hawks said. “It’s a continuing interaction.'”

Comment: The rest of the article is a review of possible migrations and interbreeding. My point in presenting it is that it is a direct refutation of the dhw point that God seemed to diddling around with so many parts of a developing human bush instead of getting right to the point of making modern humans. He obviously had a plan to use different forms to offer contributions to the final result, forms that developed (evolved) different contributions.

dhw today (Thursday, August 29, 2019, 19:31) wrote "According to you, then, it was his decision to take 3.X billion years before starting to fulfil his one and only purpose, which was to design H. sapiens (though even then he designed lots of hominins and homos before designing the only one he wanted to design – see below). He therefore had to design the rest of the bush to cover the time he had decided to take. '"

dhw doesn't seem to be able to imagine a God that is entirely purposeful and knows exactly what He is doing. dhw's view of God has Him bumbling along.