Woolly Mammoth resurrection - I'll believe it when I see it . . .

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

I thought that there would be a problem with oxygen levels or some sh1t

Naw that's only with dinosaurs as the O2 levels back then were much higher than today.

1ZRed wrote: »

There is less than 5% neanderthal DNA in us, that's largely due to us splitting from the same gene pool so we have DNA in common, on either side.

There's also doubt that neanderthals interbred with us.

That doubt is highly dubious. For a start there are clear well dated sites of Neandertal populations that are more recent than that study(if you could call it that) mentions. There was almost certainly a period of time when Neandertal and modern human populations overlapped in the same area. Many thousands of years of time. That's in Europe alone. never mind in the middle east 100-90 Kya where we were living cheek by jowl for thousands of years and where the genetic "clock" suggests that's where we got jiggy with each other, not in later Europe(that said I'll put money down we got jiggy in Europe too).

As for the less than 5%/shared gene pool part? Couple of problems with that. 1) the genetic clock shows the insertion of genes came much later after the shared history event. 300,000 years later. 2) Otzi the iceman's DNA show nearly 7% Neandertal because the bloke was closer to the event by a few thousand years 3) and the one that kills it stone dead, modern humans went through a genetic bottleneck in Africa where we were reduced to tens of thousands in number. So all humans today are related to that small African group. In which case that research has to be wrong in it's conclusions, because we should all then have Neandertal DNA if it was shared from before or we all shouldn't if it wasn't, but we do and we vary in that. Never mind Denisovan DNA from another human subspecies in Asia. Some modern populations have over 10% of their genes in them.

If they were brought back they would not be homosapien or "human", as they are a different subspecies.

They would be very close to us in genetics. We, modern humans, are quite 'inbred" for a species. EG Chimp populations living just ten miles apart have more genetic diversity than all humans throughout the world. Adding in Neandertal and Denisovan folks(and likely other undiscovered cousins. There's at least one to be found in Africa I reckon) would expand our diversity but not by that much. IMHO they would be full members of our "human" species. Sub sub species at a push.

Would they be like us? Harder call. If we did bring back a Neandertal, he or she would come to us cultureless. We'd learn nothing about how they would have been back in the day. They would be brought up in a modern human environment. I strongly suspect that in such an environment they'd end up as pretty much another human, just like you and me. They might be less "tame", less domesticated in nature compared to modern humans. Maybe a comparison might be drawn comparing the diffs between a wolf and a domestic dog. Basically the same species but with a number of behavioral differences. They might be more "wolf like". I'd say similar if we brought back an earlier version of Homo Sapiens from say 100kya. Back then we don't look too much different to others like Neandertals. Big brow ridges and all. Culturally we weren't so different either. That came much later.

Even so take the cultures of clearly modern folks and compare them to Neandertals. If all we had of native Australians were their stone tools and we'd lost all their complex art and stories, we'd likely say Neandertals were more advanced culturally, in stone tool use anyway. Take modern Andaman islanders, the isolated tribal ones can't control fire. They store fire as burning embers from existing fires/lightning strikes etc, but can't actually make it. Neandertals could, they could even cook up compound glues that require some tricky chemistry. They also carved complex wooden items that Andamans don't(we're only scratching the surface on that side).

TL;DR? I'd regard Neandertal folks if they were still around as people, just like you and me, or anyone else around today.