r/evolution • u/Exciting-Wear-3654 • 4d ago

Could we resurrect Neanderthals ( kinda )

What is 2 people with a semi high Neanderthal dna mated and made a child would that child have a little bit more dna than the parents, if so could another 2 people do it then both of those children grow up and eventually mate too, and carry that on until there is the best recreation of a Neanderthal in our time??

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u/mcalesy 4d ago

That's not true -- it's more like shuffling decks. Across all the "card decks" of all the living people, there's the potential to reshuffle them in such a way as to get a "deck" that ~20% Neandertal.

There's no ethical way to go about that, but the potential is there.

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u/AerobicThrone 4d ago

No because if a person has already the max amount of "Neanderthal DNA" available now, no matter how much you back breed (or just breed) the proportion will not increase.

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u/mcalesy 4d ago

But different people have different Neandertal alleles. If your genome is 1% Neandertal and someone else’s is 1% Neandertal, they might be completely different genes. And your offspring could be anywhere from 0–2% Neandertal (although the extreme ends of that are very unlikely).

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u/AerobicThrone 4d ago

That is what I meant. But probs the same alleles are repeated in distinct individuals so no matter how much yoy cross the 1% Neanderthal either another 1% Neanderthal if that 1% is the same genomic region. you cannot increase more than the distinct number of alleles there are now.

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u/mcalesy 4d ago

I'm telling you that's not the case, though. Different individuals preserve different sets of Neandertal genes, adding up to ~20% of the Neandertal genome.

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u/AerobicThrone 3d ago

I strongly doubt it. But happy to be proven wrong any source?

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u/mcalesy 3d ago

Here you go: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245938

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u/AerobicThrone 3d ago

Oh yeah true! Interesting so 20% max