Word: homo
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...populations did not evolve in isolation but in concert, trading genetic material by interbreeding with neighboring groups. "Today," says Thorne, "human genes flow between Johannesburg and Beijing and between Paris and Melbourne. Apart from interruptions from ice ages, they have probably been doing this through the entire span of Homo sapiens' evolution...
...known as the Neanderthals, a primitive people who lived from around 200,000 to 27,000 years ago. And while many misconceptions and mysteries about Neanderthals have been resolved, one question remains unanswered: Were the Neanderthals a branch on the evolutionary tree that withered and died while Homo sapiens -- modern human beings -- continued to evolve? Or were they really ancestors of at least some people living today...
...most scientists of the time disputed even the Neanderthal man's antiquity. Rudolf Virchow, a respected German anatomist, pronounced the caveman to be a modern Homo sapiens, whose deformations were caused by rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life. And his flattened skull? He had suffered powerful blows to the head, Virchow opined...
...research into Neanderthals, the relationship between them and modern humans is still a topic for hot debate. Some textbooks classify Neanderthals as a subspecies within Homo sapiens; others list a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. British paleontologist Christopher Stringer is convinced that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from Homo erectus and suddenly became extinct between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago, unable to compete effectively with Homo sapiens originating in Africa. "In my view," he says, "they are a dead end -- highly evolved in their own direction but not in the direction of modern humans...
Other scientists say Neanderthal genes survive today. Milford Wolpoff, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, points to Neanderthal features in early Europeans as evidence that considerable interbreeding took place between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, who coexisted for tens of thousands of years in some regions...