Ironically, given that people of African descent have the least Neanderthal DNA, this study actually bolsters a supposedly discredited, baseless stereotype that they are less sensitive to pain:
"People of African descent" have the highest genetic diversity among all human subgroups. That fact alone makes making generalizations based on supposed genetic make-up preposterous.
Also, you have to be absurdly blind to the history of scientific racism to not understand that the stereotype of being less sensitive to pain has a historical origin in justifying abusing slaves by dehumanizing them.
I am NOT approaching this from any kind of racial stereotyping, but merely from a genetic point of view, but reading the article I had the same thought.
I had previously understood, that native domestic sub-Saharan Africans (i.e. those living on the continent, with clear African based heritage) did not have any Neanderthal DNA, as Neanderthals were further down the evolutionary line of the first emigration out of Africa, and were primarily European based. Therefore those with purely African genetic history would never had interbred with them.
Is this still true, or have I been walking around with a massive misunderstanding here?
As a footnote, We need to still be able to ask these questions without being afraid of the racism response. We are all different, we should embrace that and not let it affect scientific discussion or discovery.
As is usually the case, reality is to messy for simple explanations like this to be completely correct. Europe and Africa are pretty close, so there has been a lot of migration to and fro, some of it bringing Neanderthal DNA into Africa: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/africans-carry-surpr...
- "modern Europeans and East Asians apparently inherited about 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals"
- "African individuals on average had [...] more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about [...] 0.3% of their genome."
So the article seems to confirm a 10x difference in Neanderthals DNA, which might be significant.
It's also unclear what they mean by "Africans, did the same include,
e.g. Egyptians of Greek descent?
Fascinating revelation. What still puzzles me is how Asian populations have a slightly higher average proportion of Neanderthal DNA when their range was predominantly over the European part of Eurasia.
> "People of African descent" have the highest genetic diversity among all human subgroups.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with Neanderthal interbreeding.
Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal DNA that other humans from outside of Africa because interbreeding occurred when we left Africa and met Neanderthals in Eurasia.
Based on that it is not crazy to formulate the hypothesis that any traits we may have inherited from Neanderthals might be less pronounced in sub-Saharan Africans, though obviously hypotheses are not facts and one has to be very prudent, and even more so when calling on racial stereotypes...
Slavery is much older than the period that the term "scientific racism" refers to. Older slave holders had no trouble justifying slavery.
Interestingly, the many slave rebellions of antiquity (and after) by and large did not seek to abolish slavery, only to switch who's a slave, and who's a slave holder.
> Romans (or whatever) did not treat their slaves as sub-humans
I mean, that's pushing it. Obviously, their concept of slavery wasn't really based on ethnicity, and manumission was generally more common and socially acceptable than it was in American slavery. But the treatment of slaves in Ancient Rome was certainly inhuman by modern standards.
The Romans also had mechanisms to, in practice, suppress the political power of descendants of slaves; in practice almost all freedmen went into one of the urban tribes (the very wealthy could buy into a rural tribe), making their votes largely irrelevant, for instance. It's reasonable to view New World slavery as a special evil, but Roman slavery was Pretty Bad, too.
> The Romans also had mechanisms to, in practice, suppress the political power of descendants of slaves; in practice almost all freedmen went into one of the urban tribes (the very wealthy could buy into a rural tribe), making their votes largely irrelevant, for instance. It's reasonable to view New World slavery as a special evil, but Roman slavery was Pretty Bad, too.
Those mechanisms sound a lot like present day gerrymandering[1][2] coupled with redlining[3][2].
Look at it the other way around: white people have higher pain sensitivity. You don't have to make a generalisation about all peoples from Africa, you can just make a generalisation about white people. We know there was a genetic bottleneck.
Comments like being "absurdly blind" are stupid. Are you going to discredit current science because of some loosely related historical events?
If we resume the finding this in term of skin color: "some middle-aged people (mostly 'white') have higher pain sensitivity than other middle-aged people (mostly 'white')
From the article:
> About 0.4% of participants in the UK Biobank, a genome database of half a million British people, who reported on their pain symptoms had one copy of the mutated gene. No one had two, like Neanderthals. Participants with the mutated version of the gene were about 7% more likely to report pain in their lives than were people without it.
About UK Biobank:
> The study is following about 500,000 volunteers in the UK, enrolled at ages from 40 to 69. Initial enrollment took place over four years from 2006, and the volunteers will be followed for at least 30 years thereafter.
0.4% of people who _were already reporting on their pain_ (likely a group who are plausibly more likely to have some sort of pain issues than the general population) had this gene. That is, this is extremely rare. And the effect was small. It shouldn't bolster any stereotypes.
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4843483/