Posted on 07/24/2006 11:41:28 AM PDT by doc30
BERLIN — U.S. and German scientists have launched a two-year project to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal, a feat they hope will help deepen understanding of how modern humans' brains evolved.
Neanderthals were a species that lived in Europe and western Asia from more than 200,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago. Scientists from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology are teaming up a company in Connecticut to map the genome, or humans' DNA code.
“The Neanderthal is the closest relative to the modern human, and we believe that by sequencing the Neanderthal we can learn a lot,” said Michael Egholm, a vice-president at 454 Life Sciences Corp. of Branford, Conn., which will use its high-speed sequencing technology in the project.
There are no firm answers yet about how humans picked up key traits such as walking upright and developing complex language. Neanderthals are believed to have been relatively sophisticated, but lacking in humans' higher reasoning functions.
The Neanderthal project follows scientists' achievement last year in deciphering the DNA of the chimpanzee, our closest living relative. That genome map produced a long list of DNA differences between humans and chimps and some hints about which differences might be crucial.
The chimp genome “led to literally too many questions, there were 35 million differences between us and chimpanzees – that's too much to figure out,” 454 chairman Jonathan Rothberg said in a telephone interview.
“By having Neanderthal, we'll really be able to home in on the small percentage of differences that gave us higher cognitive abilities,” he said. “Neanderthal is going to open the box. It's not going to answer the question, but it's going to tell where to look to understand all of those higher cognitive functions.”
Over two years, the scientists aim to reconstruct a draft of the three-billion building blocks of the Neanderthal genome – working with fossil samples from several individuals.
They face the complication of working with 40,000-year-old samples, and of filtering out microbial DNA that contaminated them after death.
Only about 5 per cent of the DNA in the samples is actually Neanderthal DNA, Mr. Egholm said, but he and Mr. Rothberg said pilot experiments had convinced them that the decoding was feasible.
At the Max Planck Institute, the project also involves Svante Paabo, who nine years ago participated in a pioneering, though smaller-scale, DNA test on a Neanderthal sample.
That study suggested that Neanderthals and humans split from a common ancestor a half-million years ago and backed the theory that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end.
The new project will help in understanding how characteristics unique to humans evolved and “will also identify those genetic changes that enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world,” Mr. Paabo said in a statement Thursday.
ping
No genetic differences at all. All Neanderthal DNA is alive and well in the NFL........
>>Any estimates as to what the genetic differences will be?<<
They covered this in this week's Simpsons - there were no cave men - man was created as is.
And here I was thinking it was alive and well in the DNC....
I don't see how they can isolate actual Neanderthal DNA?
After watching Russert over the weekend, they have living specimen in the GE family.
The same as the difference between the dunk and the two-handed set shot.
Well, I bet a lot of NFL players are Demokratz.....
I guess, depending on what samples they have and what their condition is.. the only hope of getting the original uncontaminated DNA would be deep inside of large bones (maybe in the the marrow if there's any left?). Just speculation on my part.
I respectfully disagree. There are two big things in this article. The first point cincerns techniques to separate contaminating DNA from the sample DNA. The second will let us see more specific genetic differences than those between humans and chimps. The results of science are typically small, incremental steps, not huge, fantastic leaps like those shown in the movies.
They'll have a unusual preference for roast duck and mango salsa. :-D
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Would that this could happen to Liberals. . .
They don't have much of an appetite when they're irate.
I agree with you. I'm curious who is paying for this.
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