From what is known the people we call Neanderthal were intelligent and were empathetic. They made seashell jewellery and they buried their dead covered in flowers. I'd be proud to have a high percentage.
Frame your argument a little differently - you're saying you can't be proud / ashamed of anything your parents have done (that you didn't contribute to).
Pride or shame is by definition a feeling not legal culpability. A feeling.
Human brains seem wired to have strong feelings about their kin or tribe. So, yes, I would think having neutral feelings about your parents would be a hard thing to understand for most people.
From a purely logical point of view - there's not much point to anything humans do.
Can you break down what the logic of pride should be? Any who determines what that should is. You seem to imply that there's an objective standard for that.
You're technically correct and I agree with you, but you're missing the broader point: the goal of GP comment was to make the author of GGP comment feel better about having a high percentage of neanderthal DNA.
People... aren't smart by default. The belief that Native Americans were sub-human because they didn't demonstrate the highly developed behavior of gross public displays of affection was perpetuated by, if you couldn't guess, the early French. Others used that and similar ideas to perpetuate the image that they were irredeemable savages by nature, less evolved and stain on the bloodlines of modern man. How ironic.
Neanderthals got a similar wrap. Early ethnocentrists believed that what succeeds in time succeeds in quality, but from all modern evidence, you share ancestry with a more developed, intelligent race than most.
No guarantees you inherited any of those qualities, but still :)
It could've been the lack of public displays of affection. It could also have been things like the repeatedly observed acts including ritual cannibalism and other sorts of mistreatment of prisoners, such as in the Siege of Fort Henry for one famous example. [1] One should not white wash history, but going in the equal but opposite direction is absolutely no better.
Accurately recounting history is also the only way we can learn from it. If you turn a group into mindless evil idiots, then there's little to learn from such. But when you appreciate that there were real issues and awful acts that, in turn, drove no less awful responses from otherwise rationale and intelligent individuals behaving in what they felt was justifiable ways, in a sort of endless pendulum of death and destruction, until there was just one side left standing - it suddenly becomes strikingly similar to modern times in many ways, and there's yet much to learn from it all.
East Asians apparently have a higher percentage of Neanderthal dna than Europeans, with it going as high as 4%. It's hard to believe that at 2% it's greater than 99% of people, since 2% seems rather average for the average East Asian and the East Asian population being 1.7B or so. East Asians also have Denisovans dna as well.
I believe 23andme rounds down, so I could be at 2.49% and it would still show 2%. Anyways it's just a fun statistic based on probably not a proportionally representative sample of the entire human population, but what they have on hand.
I get a few strands of really really thick hair on my head. Sometimes in my nose too.
Also, I once had a single piece of hair that turned from fully black to fully white back to fully black in a span of maybe a dozen cm. And a few strands that turn orange-reddish, all for no apparent reason.
Though I'm just guessing this is related, maybe it's pure chance.
I wouldn't exactly say anything implies it is rare. 400,000,000 million people possess any particular trait at a greater prevalence than 95% of all people. It's more common than being an American.
You make it sounds like he choose to be insecure about it.
It's social conditioning and ego doing it's thing to create pointless suffering/insecurity as usual. Nothing new. It will keep creating suffering for pointless things. The dna % just one of the mere labels it uses.
I always like this Craig Venter / Bill Clinton anecdote:
VENTER: [Clinton's] genome is obviously totally unique, but all of our genomes are. There is this three percent difference. We got an honorary degree together a few years back. And he was the speaker. He said he learned from me that he was 4 percent Neanderthal and that explained all the problems he had in the White House.
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: It is true, you know. [...]
BURNETT: So, you're the maximum Neanderthal?
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: I don't know, when I'm told -- Hillary this wasn't surprised.
I don't mean this as a negative comment aimed at you, but I always hate these sort of anecdote. The joke hinges on something we know to not be explicitly true -- ie, that if someone had more, or less, neanderthal DNA, they would be seen to be less evolved, more crude, etc. The joke relies on a misreading of the consequences for the presence of neanderthal DNA, and is only "funny" if you intentionally misread that yourself, or if you are unaware of the actual facts.
