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? asked in Social ScienceAnthropology · 3 years ago

Are Caucasians part Neanderthal?

I was just wondering where we get our lighter skin tone from. If life for humans started in Africa then can our lighter skin tone come from our Neanderthal ancestors. If that is not the case then do Africans have part Neanderthal as well?

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  • JimZ
    Lv 7
    3 years ago
    Favourite answer

    Yes. All non subsaharan people in the world are generally part Neanderthal, generally 2 to 4% of the DNA. As Anon implies, there is a theory that light skin happened when we took up agriculture and no longer had diets rich in vitamin D. This resulted a need for whiter skin and they have found genes that appear to have mutated just over 10K years ago shortly after agriculture but long after the Neanderthal hybridization. We don't know Neanderthals were extinct 10s of thousands of years ago. We only know that the most recent fossils were about 30K years old.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    3 years ago

    While all modern humans carry a small amount of Neanderthal (except Sub-Saharan Africans), light skin did not come from them. As populations migrated away from the tropics between 125,000 and 65,000 years ago into areas of low UV radiation, they developed light skin pigmentation as an evolutionary selection acting against vitamin D depletion. Based on ancient DNA analysis conducted in 2014 on human skeletal remains from western Europe, this change from dark to light skin pigmentation likely occurred only recently for at least some Europeans. Paleogenomics researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and his colleagues observed that a 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherer from the La Braña-Arintero labyrinthine cave in the Cantabrian Mountains (León, Spain) possessed the allele for blue eyes but not the European mutations for lighter skin pigmentation.

  • 3 years ago

    Yes, they are called, "Democrats."

  • Anonymous
    3 years ago

    no, God created all of us from Adam and Eve

  • Anonymous
    3 years ago

    Yes, and so are Asians and in fact most Africans other than the ones from remote Sub-Saharan tribes (all Somalis, Nigerians, Ethiopians etc will have some as they have west Eurasian admixture from antiquity.) However, the light skin of Europeans is fairly modern and appeared long after the neanderthals died out so it wasn't from them.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    3 years ago

    No

  • Kevin7
    Lv 7
    3 years ago

    I think the answer is yes

  • Anonymous
    3 years ago

    No you didn't get skin color or any visible or noteable traits from Neanderthals. (The shared genes were all parasite/virus related.) Europeans' pale skin came from Middle eastern farmers, eastern scandinavian hunter-gatherers, and asian pastoralists migrating into Europe and accumulating multiple lighter genes 8-5,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of years after Neanderthals were extinct. They are all vit D caused. There were multiple back-migrations into Africa so many Africans have it too.

  • Anonymous
    3 years ago

    where do you people get this "life started in Africa" nonsense from ???

    try reading the TRUTH in a Bible

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