Our minds may be modern but our genes are prehistoric, which is the reason we have so much trouble losing weight! In addition to fast food, desk jobs, and inertia, there is one more thing to blame for unwanted pounds-our genome, which has apparently not caught up with the fact that we no longer live in the Stone Age: A gene known as CRTC3 decreases energy expenditure by fat cells.
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Scientists think that early humans interbred with Neanderthals, meaning we all have some of those genes. And now they think we interbred with OTHER species of early primates as well, on our way out of Africa, where we originated. This may help explain why human brains are so complex.
Anthropologists have long assumed that modern humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and decimated other intelligent primate competitors as they conquered the Earth. In New Scientist, Ewen Callaway quotes researcher Joao Zilhao as saying, "It was a very simple story. Its simplicity suggested it would not be true."
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Sometimes scientists think they did interbreed with us and sometimes they think they didn’t, but the latest research indicates that today’s human beings could be part Neanderthal.
Neanderthals were common between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago. While they co-existed with modern humans for a while, eventually they went extinct, while we Homo sapiens remained alive and prospered. In LiveScience.com, Clara Moskowitz quotes genetic anthropologist Keith Hunley as saying, “The issue has been highly contentious for some time.”
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Those mysterious early humans we call Neanderthals once lived in an area that stretched from Asia to Western Europe. Then suddenly, around 30,000 years ago, they vanished, and no scientist has been able to figure out exactly why. Now some researchers think it was climate change that did them in.
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