Face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman revealed by scientists

[muriel_volestrangler]

41. It's meaningless for the Neanderthal

It does not mean "the Neanderthals were African". The "North East African" that a modern DNA database has as a reference is North East Africans from long after 29,000 years ago. The Neanderthal's genes could not be made up of sets of genes from after they lived. North East Africans may well have inherited some Neanderthal genes, but so have various groups that are listed as "-" in the picture in #31, such as West Mediterranean.

In one sense, we (and Neanderthals) are all 100% African - all humans descend from a population in Eastern Africa, a few hundred thousand years ago. But when someone defines group as 'Baltic' etc., you're looking at a moment in time where they reckon there was little enough migration to be able to fix groups, and their genes, to those points. That might be 1492 CE, or a general "people who think their ancestors were all in this area in the 19th century", or similar. But it's well after 29,000 BCE.

(on reload, your pictures did show up for me)