All that from a toe

You can always count on Goat Rope for the latest developments in Icelandic elves, zombies, dinosaurs, Neanderthals, and such. Oh yeah, and sometimes social justice stuff.

But let's get back to Neanderthals. Another story that broke over the holidays was one about sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome from a toe bone of a female that lived around 130,000 years ago.

This specimen revealed a lot of in-breeding but also a lot of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans and another early group called Denisovans. It's not clear whether the inbreeding was common to all Neanderthals or just this batch from Siberia.

As for the inter-breeding....how can I say this? Let me just say that assuming I was younger and single, I think I'd have to be pretty anxious for a date to ask a Neanderthal out.

Now, if they'd just sequence the Icelandic elf genome...

JUST ONE OTHER LINK and, this being Friday, it's Krugman on the economy of fear.

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