Profs & Pints Philadelphia: The Neanderthals Among Us

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “The Neanderthals Among Us,” on the genetic legacy of our ancestors’ pairings with Homo neanderthalensis and what such genes tell us about prehistoric life, with Alexander Platt, evolutionary geneticist and senior research scientist at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

“Extinction” is a slippery word. Neanderthals went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, yet in a sense they’re more genetically present on Earth than ever given all of the markers of Neanderthal ancestry found mixed in the genes of the eight billion Homo sapiens around today. Moreover, Neanderthals aren’t the only type of humans whose extinctions weren’t the end of the line.

Come to Philadelphia’s Black Squirrel Club to learn about fascinating research on the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans being done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Tishkoff Lab. That lab, broadly devoted to studying genetic variation in global populations, generated worldwide headlines in February with a study finding that most of our Neanderthal ancestry appears to come from the pairing of male Neanderthals with Homo sapiens females

Dr. Alexander Platt, lead co-author of the recent study, will talk about what we know about human-Neanderthal interactions and the major questions that have yet to be answered.

You’ll learn how fossil evidence helps us know where and when individuals from various early human groups lived, while anatomical similarities between them let us speculate about their respective migration histories and their relationships. Genetic evidence, from both modern humans and samples of ancient DNA, offers us fresh insights into the connections between some of them.

Dr. Platt will talk about how modern humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor over 500,000 years ago. They then spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving on separate continents, only to encounter each other repeatedly over the last 250,000 years, during which their interactions and interbreeding left each carrying a complex set of genetic relics of the other.

Exactly how and why such pairings took place is one of the key mysteries that Dr. Platt and his colleagues are working to solve. To get a better sense of how sex differences shaped those interactions, the researchers contrast genetic diversity in non-sex chromosomes with genetic diversity in the X chromosome, more reflective of the history of women than men.

You’ll emerge from the talk with a much better understanding of how breakthroughs in genetics are contributing to our understanding of human evolution, as well as a recognition that our own genetic makeup tells us about our roots in prehistory. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man on display at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettman, Germany (Neanderthal Museum / Wikimedia Commons).