Ancient Romanian man was up to 11% Neanderthal

Adam Khor

Study suggests this individual had a Neanderthal ancestor four to six generations earlier:

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-analysis-bones-romania-evidence-human.html

stefanovich

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129542.600-neanderthalhuman-sex-bred-light-skins-and-infertility.html#.VWqvYkao-2U

Interesting. Apparently modern whites and asians have some Neanderthal genes which contributed to lighter skin among other things.

Wibbs

Interesting stuff, though this part at the end;

"The genetic evidence further backs this up. Neanderthal DNA is irregularly spaced through the modern human genome rather than being fully mixed. That implies that interbreeding occurred very rarely. Sankararaman estimates it may have happened just four times".[emphasis mine]

that to me is bunkum and makes no sense. Not when you consider the Romanian dude of the previous article, or indeed the far more recent at three thousand odd years ago Otzi the iceman who had much higher amounts of Neandertal compared to people today, or how different modern populations have different Neandertal genes. As I've reckoned before genes can go very rare in the modern population pretty quickly. Look at our neighbour England. We know there was a cultural and physical migration from north west Europe in the form of the Saxons just over a thousand years ago. They showed up in some numbers. Yet today, the female lines have all died out and the male lines are rare, something like 3% and clustered in the east. Add another thousand years and they could well all vanish. After ten or twenty thousand years?

While research is moving apace and genetics is an incredible tool at our disposal we have sooooo much left to learn about it, we're still at the early stages.

Manach

Currently I'm reading Before the Dawn, by N.Wade. A great deal of the early chapter do rely on DNA evidence to mark when various splits occurred in the ancestoral tree. So it does seem to be a mature technology.
For Wibb's example, perhaps an explanation is that the Saxon migration would not have been from a homogenuous population and would have have varies levels of settlers (from serfs to carls) who would have come from a different genetic background - eg as how Iceland was settled (from a recent travel book on Nordic countries by M. Booth). So the markers that are being tracked are outliers?