Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway4666 | Hacker News Reader

>Analyses of their genomes showed that they contributed genetically to present-day people outside sub-Saharan Africa

This is wrong. Recent analyses (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30059-3) have shown Neanderthals have also contributed to Sub-Saharan DNA. Maybe the authors weren't aware of the latest findings at the time of writing and no one ever thought of correcting that part.

View on HN

Or, because that is a new finding, using (by the authors' own description) a "novel" method of deducing it, they just aren't convinced yet. It is a tricky business to do, and especially without any human-but-0%-Neanderthal sample to compare against. Maybe the authors of the Cell paper have done it, but it wouldn't totally shock me if the rest of their field is not convinced.

Well if the paper made it to Cell at least two other people in the field are convinced.

Technically it would just mean that at least the reviewers were convinced it was important work which should get looked at by the rest of the field, i.e. worth publishing. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just saying that even things which get published in major publications like Cell don't always hold up, and a major revision of the understanding prior to that article is probably more likely than most to be a case of that.

Although, for my part, I find it entirely plausible that if sapiens interbred with neanderthals in Europe, some of that found its way back into Africa. But it is not a major miss of some sort in the parent article to not take that as demonstrated yet.

> Recent analyses have shown Neanderthals have also contributed to Sub-Saharan DNA.

To what extent?

At least 17Mbp (vs. ~50Mbp in Eurasians)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com