SmashMouth

Yeah but..... who did the Native Americans steal land from? And are they really Native? Just how far back should we really go?

vpheughan

Neanderthals!

Neanderthals are our closest extinct human relatives. There is some debate as to whether they were a distinct species of the Homo genus (Homo neanderthalensis) or a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Our well-known, but often misunderstood, fossil kin lived in Eurasia 200,000 to 30,000 years ago, in the Pleistocene Epoch. They started to evolve 300,000 and 100,000 years ago, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Recent research published in the October 2017 issue of American Journal of Human Genetics found that genomes of modern human groups originating outside Africa contain between 1.8 and 2.6 percent Neanderthal DNA. "Neandertal DNA is one source of variation for many traits in modern humans," study lead author Michael Dannemann, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Live Science.

No one knows exactly why Neanderthals went extinct and why Homo sapiens survived. Some scholars theorize that gradual or dramatic climate change led them to their demise, while others blame dietary deficiencies. Some theorize that humans killed the Neanderthals. Until recently the hypothesis that Neanderthals didn't go extinct but simply interbred with humans until they were absorbed into our species was popular.

"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom." Winston Smith