Neandertal and Denisovan blood groups deciphered

Fascinating! It makes sense that low birth rate was a contributing factor in the demise of the Neanderthals.

>2 Marissa_Doyle: Yes. Amazing discovery about the Rh allele!

>1 clamairy: Thank you.

>3 clamairy: This was especially interesting to me. It’s not really surprising that Neanderthals and Denisovans have similar ABO blood types to us. Our lineages were only separate for a bunch of hundreds of thousands of years, and there would have had to have been something dramatic to have occurred for major differences between our red blood cell antigens to have developed. Either for us to have acquired new antigens or Neanderthals and Denisovans to have lost theirs. So this finding is consistent with the notion that ancestors of all three groups originated in Africa. They all left with their ABO system antigens intact.

The Rh finding is especially interesting to me. So apparently Neanderthals had an Rh allele absent in all modern humans except an Aboriginal Australian and a person from Papua. And we already know that Denisovan genes are most prevalent in Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal Australians. One wonders what exactly took place. After a dispersion from Africa, was there interbreeding with Denisovans among those people who happened to head toward those geographic regions? Was that because that was the region of overlap between the groups? Or was that interbreeding earlier, part of a different dispersion? We know there was not a single exodus, but the details are unclear. The prevailing notion is that one dispersion around 60K years ago “took”, but that there were numerous previous departures of anatomically modern humans. Fates unclear. I have always wondered whether these groups (and others, for example the Andaman Island peoples) departed Africa earlier.

Thanks for posting this!

In this fast-moving field, the last couple of popular interpretations I read were:
Adam Rutherford, A brief history of everyone who ever lived : the stories in our genes (2016).
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here (2018).

What would people recommend as an update?

I did a dna test and can confirm that as a North European I have both small parts of Neanderthal and Denisovan in my genes.

>6 Cynfelyn: Books are lagging tools for following science, by a year or many years. I’m not aware of another book at the level of David Reich’s since. I tend to go with following the papers, comments, Twitter feeds, etc of paleoanthropology and paleoanthropologists, including the articles and tweets of the best paleoanthropology science writers.