Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday edition of your open thread. Place your brain droppings below.

Are you part Neandertal?

Researchers sequencing Neandertal DNA have concluded that between 1 and 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans.

A team of scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig pieced together the first draft of the sequence—which represents about 60 percent of the entire genome—using DNA obtained from three Neandertal bones that come from Vindija cave in Croatia and are more than 38,000 years old. The researchers detail their analysis of the sequence in the May 7 Science.

This answers some questions about whether early homo sapiens interacted. The answer is yes, but perhaps limited. I think we still don’t know whether Cro-Magnon killed off the Neandertal or whether Neandertal disappeared for other reasons.

Birthers are strange.

Fourteen percent of Americans say without prompting that they think Barack Obama was born in another country, rising to one in five when those with no opinion are offered that as a possibility. But for many it’s not a firm belief – and some appear not to hold it against him.

Among those inclined to think Obama was born abroad, half also say that’s their suspicion only, not a judgment based on solid evidence, the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll finds. And perhaps surprisingly, about a third of so-called “birthers” nonetheless approve of Obama’s work in office and express a favorable opinion of him personally.

ABC News also says this: That, along with other data, supports the notion that some of this view is an expression of antipathy toward Obama, rather than a firm belief he was born in another country. To which the rest of us say “duh.”