Sunday, December 01, 2013

This explains many things...

Study suggests inbreeding shaped course of early human evolution

Humans lived for thousands of years in small, isolated populations and resulting inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution, a U.S. researcher says. Research suggests the severe inbreeding may have created many health problems and the small populations were likely a barrier to the development of complex culture and technologies, NewScientist.com reported Thursday. David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston -- who has sequenced the genome of Neanderthals and that of another extinct human, the Denisovans -- said both species were severely inbred due to small populations."Archaic populations had low genetic diversity, really extraordinarily low," he said. "It's among the lowest diversity of any organism in the animal kingdom."...more

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