Neanderthal Genome almost Mapped

This is a review of an article by Steve Olson in the Smithsonian magazine of October, 2006.

Svante Paabo is director of the genetics department at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In the past, he had much success with extracting DNA with from ancient humans, such as 2,400 year old mummies and the ice man. This success led Paabo to take on some very tough questions: What are the relationships of us and extinct homo species? When the ancestors of today's Europeans began migrating into Europe roughly 40,000 years ago, what really happened to the Neanderthals? Did we simply out-compete them, or did we interbreed with them, meaning that some very small fraction of their DNA is in us?

Paablo decided to look for mitochondria DNA in original Neanderthal bones. Many other colleagues did not see much hope in this technique but Paablo persisted and eventually got a bone specialist to saw off part of an arm bone of a 42,000 year old Neanderthal fossil. Paablo and his group found that this Neanderthal’s DNA was quite different. More studies then began to show that Neanderthals contributed very little, if any DNA to modern humans. Instead, we appear to have displaced them for the most part. There was very little interbreeding between the two groups, if any. The same seems to go for other archaic populations such as Homo erectus and Homo habilus. We just don’t seem to find much of a genetic trace of them in our code. Recently, Paablo is trying to derive more than just mitochondrial DNA, but much longer DNA strands that are responsible for building the rest of the body. Their end goal is to reconstruct the entire genetic blueprint for making a Neanderthal. They estimated it would take about two years to finish, and this article was written almost exactly two years ago. By doing this, his ultimate goal is to help identify any genetic changes that made us human, by noticing which genes are different, when this roughly happened, and maybe even why it happened. If I was doing this, I know I would have some side goals also. After entirely mapping out the Neanderthal genome, it could be theoretically possible to clone a Neanderthal. I would want to secretly reconstruct a few Neanderthals so that their lineage can live on once again!