Posted on 10/01/2006 11:00:57 AM PDT by blam
If his teeth still hold onto DNA after 35,000 years, a Brit he was not.
And sometime in the next few weeks, a team led by molecular geneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, will announce an even more stunning achievement: the sequencing of a significant fraction of the genome of Neanderthals—the human-like species we picture when we hear the word caveman—who are far closer to us genetically than chimps are. And though Neanderthals became extinct tens of thousands of years ago, Paabo is convinced he's on the way to reconstructing the entire genome of that long-lost relative, using DNA extracted, against all odds, from a 38,000-year-old bone. Time Magazine, Sunday, Oct. 1, 2006, What Makes Us Different.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1711537/posts
Do you mean not related at all, or just not closely related? I know Neanderthals are a different species than Homo Sapiens, but wouldn't there be some similarity in the DNA? After all, I can't think that Neanderthal DNA would be closer to a dog's or a cat's or a mammoth's than to a modern human's. But then, I was a literature major. What do I know?
The Neandertal EnigmaFrayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]
by James Shreeve
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