Neanderthal Genome to be Sequenced

Aneurysm writes "A project launched by the Max-Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology will sequence the genome of Neanderthal man. The sequencing project may find out important information, such as whether they cross-bred with modern humans. Previous DNA tests have tested this theory, and found it unlikely. Could this be the start of a Pleistocene park?"

Comments

According to my girlfriend...

[esobofh]

I could have easily supplied the necessary sample for testing...

Re:According to my girlfriend...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should promptly club her over the head for suggesting such a thing!

I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[nizo]

From wikipedia: Also, while they [Neanderthals] had weapons, they were not used as projectile weapons. They had spears in the sense of a long wooden shaft with an arrow head firmly attached to it, but spears were first used as projectiles by Homo sapiens.

Three guesses why they are gone and we aren't? It would be truely ironic if we did indeed clone a Neanderthal and thus bring back a sentient species that most likely was wiped out in large part because of us.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[Anonymous Coward]

That's doubtful. Neanderthals and Europeans co-existed for a maximum of 15,000 years. That's a long time. If they could figure out how to make a spear, they could easily figure out how to throw them if at least in immitation of humans.

Neanderthals were far, far physically stronger, so they would've been quite capible of using them.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[meringuoid]

It would be truely ironic if we did indeed clone a Neanderthal and thus bring back a sentient species that most likely was wiped out in large part because of us.

They're extinct because of us, but probably not because our ancestors murdered them all, in character for H. Sapiens though that would certainly be. At the Skhul cave in Israel there's pretty good evidence for moderns and Neanderthals living alongside each other for thousands of years in the same cave system.

More likely the Neanderthals were just outcompeted for resources by our ancestors, as the ice ages came and went, and gradually went extinct. Not that I'd be surprised if someone found a mass grave of Neanderthals with distinctly modern-looking arrowheads in their skulls... after all, our species does enjoy killing.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[cheesybagel]

That is one theory for the extinction, that homo sapiens killed them. Here is another theory which I think may have some merit:

One of prehistory's big questions is: Why did the Neanderthals become extinct at roughly the same moment that Homo sapiens arrived from Africa? At Sopena we may learn if there were significant differences in behaviors that gave an edge to modern humans. Could it have been diet or the way they processed food?

Yes. We look for remains like bones, charcoals from their fires and tools. From this we can learn how their diet changed over time. It's like we're digging through prehistoric domestic waste. Isotopic analysis of Neanderthal bones shows that they were almost entirely carnivores.

They mostly ate meat. And you need carbohydrates. We're finding that modern humans, coming from Africa, had a diet much more variable than Neanderthals. It's always been thought about the Neanderthal extinction that Homo sapiens appeared in Europe and outcompeted Neanderthals. But it's not so easy. Forty thousand years ago was the last ice age. In that time, many animals became extinct. If Neanderthals survived on mammal meat, and those animals were nowhere to be found, they were in trouble. And then you had modern man coming in from Africa, where there weren't seasons. They were eating seafood and vegetables and grasses, even fat extracted from bones by boiling them. It is possible this gave them an edge. We may find out.

In short, we survived because we had a more varied diet than they had. It may also explain why Neanderthals were taller than we are (they ate more meat), and why people have been getting taller from the XXth century onwards contrary to what was expected (inexpensive meat is more commonly available).

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[Rei]

The problem is that almost everything went extinct when we moved on in. Whether we directly hunted them down or just disrupted the ecosystem/carried disease/etc is a good question, but wherever humans went, large fauna died off in huge numbers. Some of Australia's megafauna may be an exception, but it's just that: an exception. Places where humans didn't get to early on had megafauna last longer - for example, Wrangel Island had mammoths holdouts till the time of the Pharaohs.

Neanderthals were taller than we are

No.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[SysSupport]

so I am still left to wonder why they are gone and we are still here.

Because the Monolith landed on our side of the river.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[MightyMartian]

This seems the most likely explanation. The latest Neandertal remains found, from Gibraltar, indicate a population that had been pushed to the margins, and to such low numbers that they could not be sustained. We can only guess at how well Moderns and Neandertals got along, though my understanding is that, towards the end, there was some innovation in their toolkits, suggesting they may have been very different from us, but still capable of attempting to catch on to the new wave.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[ultranova]

Are you sure this is such a hot idea?

As a member of a minority living near the arctic circle, I find your implication that "hot" equates "good" and that, therefore, it's opposite, "cold", equates "bad", extremely insulting, and demand that you immediately cease and desist from any further usage of such hatefull terms in public discourse. Furthermore, I demand a compensation of $100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion US dollars) for the mental anguish your thermal prejudices have caused me.

Failure to comply will result in retaliatory measures to be carried out by trained polar bears.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[BerntB]

Check out the author William Calvin.

He is a brain researchers that write about (amongs other things) the evolution of human intelligence. (He even wrote a book about Neanderthals.) One of his theses is that throwing might have been a driver for human intelligence.

If I remember correctly...
To hit something you have to send more or less a symphony of nerve signals down the arm without waiting for feedback. Because the exact time of release is shorter than the average time random wait for nerve signals, they even have to go parallell and be averaged in the muscles.

Then there is distance measurements that needs to be done well in the visual system. Etc.

In short, it is a complex problem that needs lots of evolved specialized circuitry.

(I always wondered about fast running animals, here. The way they set their feet down while running should be as complex a problem as throwing? But those that run fast on the planet don't have hands.)

I think I can safely say that Calvin thinks the Neanderthals would have been hard pressed to learn to throw.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[The Lynxpro]

"In the last 50 years or so, Europeans have become on average about 2 cm taller than Americans. I'd guess (though I'm not sure) that Americans eat more meat than Europeans."

I don't believe that such averages can be attributed to diet/nutrition/prenatal/obesity. Compare the level of immigration to the United States over the past 50 years from Asian countries versus how many Asians moved to Europe over that same period of time. There's your explanation.

I mean, just look around and see how "white" Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans are all getting taller than the prior generations. I'm of that first category (and partly of the last) and I'm 2 inches taller than my father, who in turn is 2 inches taller than his father, and the mothers have all been around the same height too.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[Rei]

the more likely we are to *NOTICE* that it went extinct

We notice animals that survive, too. Smaller animals have higher survival rates, plain and simple.

Very few (no?) large animals survived the extinction

The K-T extinction had only a slightly higher megafauna extinction rate than that wrought during human expansion. The extinction during the last ice age was the largest, among megafauna, in the past 65 million years. The K-T extinction was a lot worse on small animals than the Pliestocene extinction, although it still focused on megafauna.

Even if it is true that many large animals died off around 10K BC

You better believe it; it's about as close to a scientific consensus as you can get.

This is still perfectly consistant with the ice age

That it is not. As mentioned previously:

1) Far worse ice ages have occurred in the past, without anything at all like what we saw at the end of the Pliestocene. This extinction was the worst since the K-T extinction 65 million years prior - a huge amount of time (and ice ages!).

2) The extinction timings varied around the world, and were not timed to regional ice age variations; the only correlating factor was the arrival of humans.

3) There is one place in the world that was strangely unaffected by megafauna extinctions: Africa. The place where humans and the native animals coevolved.

About the only serious evidence-based argument against the "humans did it" line of argument is that there's a paucity of fossil evidence of sudden dieoffs. Yet, it's pretty clear to most that this is a rather weak argument.

For one, you're looking for a single stratum that in most places would last only a decade; you can expect that stratum to not exist in the vast majority of the world. Secondly, it is almost impoissible to find the remains of the thousands of modern elephants killed by poachers and in herd culls in Africa. The simple fact is that fossilization is a very rare event, and the only reason that we have so many fossils total is because they accumulate over geological time periods. The fossil evidence shows what you would expect to find: in each place, the animals abruptly dissapear from the fossil record at almost the same time that humans arrive, irregardless of climate or other such factors in the particular region.

We've even watched this happen in modern times; read up about the Moa of New Zealand, for starters. New Zealand, if I recall correctly, has about the land area of New Mexico, and is incredibly rugged terrain; hardly an "easy" place to cause an extinction. Yet, the Maori did it with extreme skill. The only large quantities of butchered Moa fossils are in relatively small Maori campsites. Odds are miniscule that these campsites would preserve over geological time, let alone preserve and be rediscovered.

Re:I hope they clone a Neanderthal

[ryusen]

As a member of the People for the Ethical Treament of Animals, i find it deplorable and sickening that you would use these great and noble animals to fight your battles for you. I demand that you compensate our organization $100,000,000,000 US; none of which will actually got to the bears themselves, but help further our causes, such as running almost naked through Spain with bull horns taped to our heads.

AMAZING ADVANCES IN SCIENCE

[Anonymous Coward]

July 06, 2005: Project to sequence genome of Neanderthal Man begins.
September 3, 2009: Genome of Neanderthal Man sequenced.
March 21, 2012: Neanderthal Man cloned.
April 4, 2015: Neanderthal Man reaches the point of being able to form, in a grunting, slurred speech, individual english words.
April 5, 2015: Neanderthal Man starts blog

Re:AMAZING ADVANCES IN SCIENCE

[Anonymous Coward]

April 6, 2015: Slashdot posts article on Neanderthal blogs.
April 9, 2015: Slashdot posts article on Neanderthal blogs.

Re:AMAZING ADVANCES IN SCIENCE

[AllahsAvatar]

January 20, 2001: Neanderthal Man became persident of the US

Re:AMAZING ADVANCES IN SCIENCE

[sconeu]

April 8, 2030 - Neanderthal Becomes lawyer.

I'm just a poor cloned Neanderthal. Your world confuses and frightens me.

"Could this be the start of a Pleistocene park?"

[TobyWong]

"Could this be the start of a Pleistocene park?"

Nah my nephew has been working on a pleistocene park for a while now. He's got the swings, sandbox, and slide done (he had the see-saws done too but he accidentally stepped on them). If you want to pitch in he could use some help with the merri-go-round I'm sure.

He was originally using playdough but I caught him eating it one too many times so I switched him over to pleistocene.

What's left of them?

[Jafafa Hots]

Some scientists believe that homo sapiens replaced Neaderthals, with the Neanderthals dying off completely.
Some believe we interbred with them and "absorbed" them.

This may be able to tell us which is true. I wonder though, if we do find out that we absorbed them through interbreeding, will this eventually lead to discrimination against those of us who still harbor "caveman genes?"

Re:What's left of them?

[spike hay]

Except that research shows that the human gene pool has a rather significant bottleneck, wherein we all descend from a small set of individuals not to far in the past. There is so little genetic variation in humans that if some of us have Neanderthal genes, then all of us do.

No, the genetic bottleneck occured far before homo sapiens escaped Africa and made contact with Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East. H. Sapiens only reached Europe around 45,000 years ago. The genetic bottleneck occured 150,000 years ago or so in sub-Saharan Africa when humanity almost went extinct.

Thus, Asians and especially sub-Saharan Africans would show no Neanderthal genes, while caucasians would, if there was interbreeding.

"Genome"

[No Such Agency]

The genome is ALL the genetic material, both transcribed genes (which make RNA molecules and then proteins) and the so-called "junk DNA". The latter, it turns out, is not remotely "junk", but contains important regulatory sequences which control gene activation/deactivation and the physical structure of the chromosomes.

White House shows interest

[Anonymous Coward]

President Bush expressed considerable interest in the Neanderthal Genome sequencing project. The president expressed hope the project would be completed quickly enough that a living person whose DNA most closely matched that of a Neanderthal could be identified and nominated to the Supreme Court.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard

[Rei]

Back in their day, all they had were AMP and ADP; ATP hadn't been invented yet. In those times, glycolysis took two glucose for every one ADP produced, and they were proud of it! Back then, everything ate up that precious ADP - even the Calvin cycle. Oh, sure, it violated their ability to continue on as lifeforms indefinitely, but it was all they had to work with.

Back then, oxygen didn't end up making it into the bloodstream and then to the cells and mitochondria through diffusion from concentration differentials across membranes; they had to put it in manually. It got tiring after a while, all of the precision injection work, but it gave them exercise - a good muscle builder, it was. And, boy, did they need that muscle tone to hunt, what with only being able to synthesize two of their amino acids on their own.

We've come a long way, my friend. A long way.

ahhh

[ImaLamer]

There is a big difference between knowing how to do something and doing it well. Monkeys (APES!!!) can throw stuff, but they don't really hit their targets often. For apes, it is more of a bluffing technique - "look, I'm thowing this towards you".

There has been a lot of research into the theory that one reason we made it out of our ancient roots is because we threw so well. Not only could we throw rocks and later spears, but we could actually hit our targets. Of course we weren't always that great, and those who weren't died... you know the rest.

Basically, one author put it like this 'Is pitching an evolved skill?'

Re:Yes! Imagine the possibilities....

[MustardMan]

Andre the giant suffered from a disease called acromegaly, which caused him to continually grow, such that the proportions of his body took a constant toll on it. Near his death he was in constant pain, and eventually died of heart failure because the muscle simply couldn't keep up with the size of his body. Most people who were diagnosed with the disease in his time didn't live to 40. Saying he was like a neanderthol just because he had a funny shaped head is incredibly stupid and closed minded. The man suffered from an illness which gave him a short, painful life. That he was able to capitolize on the outward appearance given to him by the disease to make his life into a positive one is a testament to Andre's spirit.

Re:back problems

[PakProtector]

Gravity is more than just a theory. We can perform an experiment and prove it. Gravity can be observed. Evolution is different. We have not observed it happening and have not been able to perform an experiment to prove it. Gravity and Evolution are not comparable in the way you suggest.

The hell they aren't. Bacteria evolve in a course of mere days and weeks in petri dishes in labs.

And Gravity is nothing more than a theory: Like everything else, the theory of gravity was designed to explain why something happened.

The theory of evolution was designed to explain why something happened (namely, speciation.)

Please, do some damn research next time before bashing a theory.

If Cloned...

[Ranger]

I predict if Neanderthals are cloned:

A) Geico will offer them car insurance, but they won't buy because of their Caveman commercials.

B) Neanderthals will be pissed to find out were replaced by people on the B Ark.

C) Sales of backrazors will double.

D) Grunthag and Duna will top Neanderthal baby names lists just above Rena, Gort, Bob, and Winona.

Wrist Structure

[richyoung]

I read somewhere (Sci. Am.?) about someone trying to teach primates flint-knapping and throwing skills. Turns out that they understand the usefulness of the blade fine and try to create them when they need one, but they're hampered by the skeletal structure of the wrist, which is much stouter because of the need to support body weight while walking. They can't get the little wrist flick that we can that ads so much to throwing. The best an ape can hope for is chucking a rock hard against another one, and looking for sharp edges in the resulting random fragments.

So our ability to walk upright gave us the ability to use projectile weapons (i.e., hunt things faster than we are) AND create edged tools/weapons AND spark fires. Not a bad deal, IMO.