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It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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Elizabeth Kolbert
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
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The Bronx
New York City
People
Means
Significant
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Doesn
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Europeans
Around
Americans
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African
Neanderthal
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Asians

More quotes by Elizabeth Kolbert

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Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.
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We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.
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In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.
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If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.
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I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
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The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.
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Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.
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You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.
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Of the many species that have existed on earth - estimates run as high as fifty billion - more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
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As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.
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Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why? This should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids' shoes.
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As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?
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I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what's going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there.
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One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand he says the right things and he says he's committed to trying to reduce our current emissions.
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People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.
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I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.
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Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.
Elizabeth Kolbert