>>15193679

>>15193695

>>15193870

The last thing we need [are] Neaderthals thinking

>>15193406

MARSEILLE, FRANCE—According to a Cosmos Magazine report, paleoanthropologist Silvana Condemi and her colleagues at Aix-Marseille University used information from three Neanderthal genomes and one 64,000-year-old Denisovan genome to investigate their blood types. Only one Neanderthal’s blood had been typed in the past, and was found to be type O under the ABO system used to classify the blood of modern humans. Since all chimpanzees are type A, and all gorillas are type B, it was assumed that all Neanderthals were type O. But the new study found that the Neanderthal woman’s 100,000-year-old remains from Siberia’s Denisova Cave had type A blood; the Neanderthal woman’s 48,000-year-old remains from Siberia’s Chagyrskaya Cave also had type A blood; and the Neanderthal woman’s 64,000-year-old remains from Croatia’s Vindija Cave had type B blood. All three Neanderthals, however, carried a now-rare Rhesus type called “Rhesus plus incomplete,” which had only been found in the DNA of one member of Australia’s Western Desert Aboriginal people. “At the time, it was assumed to be a new Rhesus type that had arisen in Australia,” Condemi said. The rare Rhesus type has also now been found in 80 people from Papua New Guinea. “Now we know that it had existed in the past and was lost,” Condemi explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PLOS ONE. To read about sequencing of Neanderthal DNA from remains uncovered at Vindija Cave, go to "Neanderthal Genome," one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade.

https://www.archaeology.org/news/9874-210730-neanderthal-blood-types

aboriginals being rounded up in Australia have anything to do with this?

>>15193406

The authors took advantage of open access to drill down into the high-quality genomes of three Neanderthals and a Denisovan – for some reason all of them female. The Neanderthals included two Siberians: the 100,000 year old Altai female who lived in Denisova Cave, and a 48,000 year female who resided in Chagyrskaya Cave. A third female aged about 57,000 years came from Vindija Cave in Croatia. The Denisovan genome came from a female who lived in Denisova Cave about 64,000 years ago.

The first surprise was discovering that the full variability of the ABO system seen in modern humans was present in the Neanderthals. “We thought for years that H. sapiens was the only one to have the full set,” says Condemi. That was because our closest relatives have only a partial set. Chimpanzees are all type A; gorillas are all type B. Until this study the only Neanderthal to be checked was blood type O. “So the assumption was they were all O,” says Condemi.

In fact the Vindija lady was a B (genotype BO), the Chagyrskaya lady an A (genotype AA), and the Altai lady A (genotype AA). The most parsimonious explanation, says Condemi, is that the African ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, perhaps Homo heidelbergensis, already possessed the full range of the ABO system.

The next surprise was that all three Neanderthals carried a rare Rhesus type which Condemi refers to as “Rhesus plus incomplete”. This variant had only ever been seen once before. In 2019, researchers analysing the DNA of 72 Western Desert Aboriginal people found that one of them carried the same novel Rhesus type.

“At the time, it was assumed to be a new Rhesus type that had arisen in Australia,” says Condemi. “Now we know that it had existed in the past and was lost.” The authors also found that in a population of 80 people from Papua New Guinea, only one carried this rare Rh type.

The finding confirms the evidence from DNA (all non-Africans carry about 2% Neanderthal DNA) that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals in the Middle East before heading to south Asia and Australia.

The blood-type findings also gives clues as to the Neanderthals’ disappearance.

First, there’s the finding that three Neanderthals separated by 50,000 years in time and 5,000 km of space all shared the same Rhesus type. This adds to the evidence from genome studies of their low genetic diversity, a factor that can put a species at risk of being wiped out by disease.

On the other hand, interbreeding with modern humans could have put them at risk of another kind.

Condemi says that if an Rh ‘partial complete’ Neanderthal mated with an Rh complete H. sapiens, there would be an 18% chance of the infant developing the condition known as “haemolytic disease of the newborn” and dying.

Bottom line: if you need to give a Neanderthal a blood transfusion, don’t use human blood unless it’s from a rare Western Desert Australian or Papuan.

Originally published by Cosmos as How to give a Neanderthal a blood transfusion

https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/neanderthal-blood-same-as-modern-humans/