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Deciphering the DNA Code of Neanderthal Man
smooth wombat writes "U.S. and German scientists have embarked on a two-year long project to map the genetic code of Neanderthal man. Their hope is to gain a greater understanding of how modern human brains evolved. This study comes after last years completion of mapping the DNA of chimpanzees, our closest living relative." From the article: "Over two years, the scientists aim to reconstruct a draft of the 3 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 percent of the DNA in the samples is actually Neanderthal DNA, Egholm estimated, but he and Rothberg said pilot experiments had convinced them that the decoding was feasible."
You people, with your 'facts' and 'figures'.. 40,000 year old samples?!
ridiculous.
Everybody knows that the earth is only 27 years old.
-
this and yesterday's article in NYT by the same author (Nicholas Wade) look like placed (indirectly paid for to some PR mavens) ads for 454 lifesciences (if named after the famous chevy engine, a helluva name for a company). 454, having built a fair-to-middling sequencer is trying hard to stay alive in a race to the $1000 genome that will not be won by them or solexa, another startup given their slow pace and limited read lengths of the base pairs. nothing new here. move on folks.
...at this point, everything found in biology supports evolution.
Where were you when the voynix came?
We can have those cavemen all cloned and show up like in the geico comemrcials!
It'll be great they can be all hairy and be pissed off at the world. Kinda reminds me of my neighbor...
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Neanderthal man did not run on Linux.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
This link, "Announcing a two year Neandertal genome decoding project" links to several science blogger's take on this anouncement including a definited Neandertal sequencing post by John Hawks.
Anthropology.net - Beyond bones and stones.
I hope those scientists are good at math, unlike whoever made that 2+2=5 slashdot image. Otherwise it'll probably take longer than expected.
Didn't I see this in a movie?
Maybe scientists should get out more. First they sequence the Neanderthals DNA. Next, they'll be cloning one. Then the clone's start multiplying. Finally they take over the earth. Isn't this obvious to anyone else, or is it just me?
"Then the clone's start multiplying"
If we refuse to teach them addition, I think we can nip the multiplication problem in the bud. That, and pass a law prohibiting our neanderthal cousins from owning calculators.
Where were you when the voynix came?
UG-UG BAM-BAM
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
.. they lived almost exclusively on a diet of roast duck with mango salsa.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
chimpanzees, our closest living relative
I am wondering if the word "pansy" came from "chimpanzee" or vice versa ?
They will superimpose the DNA image on current human DNA, and find the following message:
"We apologize for all the inconveniences"
Where do I download the screensaver?
...the evolution of DNA in Homo Sapiens gave them a larger and more complex brain, as well as a larger larynx in order for them to speak deeply, clearly and forcefully.
Neanderthal man, on the contrary, sounded wimpy and nasal.
Neanderthals were hated by other humanoids, and were killed off due to their annoying, high-pitched voices.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neandertal
A recent study conducted on the Neanderthal hyoid found that due to the physical characteristics of Neanderthals and the fact that their larynx would have been stouter than that of the modern human, the average note emitted by Neanderthals would have been high pitched and sharper than that of modern man, contrary to the media stereotype of Neanderthals having ape-like grunts.
The base of the Neanderthal tongue was positioned higher in the throat, crowding the mouth somewhat. As a result, Neanderthal speech would most likely have been nasalized.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
. . . if they ever find the neantherthal DNA, if it exists.
I might suggest they have a look around my neighbor's house.
KFG
This should be so simple, even a caveman could do it.
..... I'm sorry. we had no idea you people were still arround!
That statement doesn't make any sense. Even ignoring the fact that you're preconcieving of what people you don't know might say about something you apparently don't understand, if it becomes another piece of evidence to toss on that outrageously huge pile of proof for our current evolutionary models, they wont' have to "spin" anything, and if they do try to "spin" something that isn't so, all the evolutionary biologists, being at no loss for evidence by any stretch of the imagination, will immediately climb all over each other to tear them to pieces for the purpose of increased visibility in the field.
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
These guys were kicked out of the gene pool thousands of years ago. Don't risk letting them back in!
That seems like a lot of work when there are plenty of living examples down at my local pub.
This is great news! First scientists intended to bring the mammal back to life, after they extracted mammal-dna in a frozen mammal in sibiria - unfortunately they failed in their quest, because elephants couldn't serve as a "mother" for an implanted egg..
;-)) to get one of her eggs to be fertilized by a neanderthal-sperm! After all, this "race"(not the right term, but correct nonetheless) of human beings (and your future kids!!) will be perfectly adopted to living in the ice age!
Now seeing how we consequently destroy our fragile climate and a possibly ice age not too far down the road, we can safely survive!!
So, if it gets too chilly for you and your possible kids just convince your wife (im assuming you're male here - it's slashdot after all - and i hope you even got a woman
Of course you'll have to throw all of that stuff about ethics away, but hey - everything comes at a price!
" convince ... to get one of her eggs to be fertilized by a neanderthal-sperm!"
I bet you really score with these pick-up lines, don't you?
Where were you when the voynix came?
... Jurassic Dork!
(Yes, yes, I know, there were no hominids in the jurassic - it's a joke...)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Just like they did with the Piltdown Man?
Here's some background that isn't apparent from the article. The CNN piece talks about Neanderthals in the context of understanding brain evolution, but the million dollar question- in most scientists' minds- is whether Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred, after 500,000 years of separation. It seems at least possible: lions and tigers produce fertile offspring and they diverged 2 million years ago. As the New York Times states,
:)
"A longstanding dispute among archaeologists is whether the modern humans who first entered Europe 45,000 years ago, ultimately from Africa, interbred with the Neanderthals or forced them into extinction. Interbreeding could have been genetically advantageous to the incoming humans, says Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, because the Neanderthals were well adapted to the cold European climate -- the last ice age had another 35,000 years to run -- and to local diseases.
Evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species, Dr. Lahn said, which could have been Neanderthals or other early humans."
Now, nobody really knows much at this point. But something that I found interesting was that, via John Hawks, "Neandertals will be within the human range of variation for most genes." And the "pilot experiments" Rothberg mentioned is a reference to how their team sequenced the DNA of the cave bear as a test-run. As I understand it this was mostly to convince museums that grinding up some of their prize Neanderthal fossils in the name of research was a good idea.
I don't have much an appetite.
I don't know about you guys but my closest living relative is probably my mother or maybe my father.
On the other hand, if they ever find the neantherthal DNA, if it exists. I wonder how they are going to spin it to claim that it supports evolution.
It sounds like you've been suckered by the propaganda campaign of the Discovery Institute to convince the public that there is still a real debate among biologists regarding the validity of evolution.
The reality is that scientists are about as interested in looking for additional evidence to support evolution as physicists are in looking for additional evidence to support the existence of gravity. Both are regarded as long-settled issues. It is certainly true that such studies in principle have the potential to disprove evolution, if the genome of neanderthals turns out to be dramatically different from humans and apes, but considering the overwhelming evidence already available to support evolution, scientists regard that as about as likely as studying a new metal alloy and discovering that it falls up.
You don't get any credit for confirming what people already know, so when this work is actually published, you won't see anything in the paper about confirming evolution--it will concern the fine details of when neanderthals split off from other primates.
http://www.rae.org/ch08tud.html
Just like the book, soon we will realize that as we have evolved from Neanderthols due to an ancient virus trapped in our DNA, so will the next group evolve from us. And they'll have neat colored patches of skin, and can say several sentences at once. o.O http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_Radio
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
Why would they do that when there's a live specimen availiable? I can't help but wonder if this is some kind clean room implementation, the kind where the room is cleaned of chairs?
looks like we all live on the same block! you know what that means of course... block party! neanderthals not invited.
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
if they ever find the neantherthal DNA, if it exists.
Of course it exists. And its still in the gene pool. Haven't you seen all those people with unibrows? :-)
On a side note - check out all the actors who have plucked their unibrows. Salma Hayek, Colin Farrell, Angie Harmon ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monobrow
mammal = Any of various warm-blooded vertebrate animals of the class Mammalia, including humans, characterized by a covering of hair on the skin and, in the female, milk-producing mammary glands for nourishing the young.
mammoth = Any of various large, hairy, extinct elephants of the genus Mammuthus, especially the woolly mammoth.
Couldn't they just use Vin Diesel's DNA?
I work for a trucking company. There's no shortage of Neanertal DNA around here...
This ain't rocket surgery.
Oops, that's neanderthal. See? I told you...
This ain't rocket surgery.
There currently are efforts underway to clone the wooly mammoth, which you can read about in the National Geographic
You can read about neanderthals from a number of different sites, wikipedia has a pretty decent page, as does talkorigins on hominid evolution in general. Reconstructing the neanderthal genome will be of great interest to science and medicine. Based on the morphology of the fossil remains and their location chronologically, evolution makes some very specific predictions about what that reconstructed genome should look like. It should be highly similar to modern H. sapiens sapiens, much more so than the couple of percent difference between our genome and chimps. If it isn't, then the theory of evolution has a very bad problem. There will not be any spin about it one way or another from the scientific community--just facts and reasonable interpretation. The neanderthal genome, if reconstructed, will also be informative on some issues such as whether or not they interbreed with H. sapiens sapiens, time of divergence with the same, and may also provide highly detailed information about their ability to speak and possibly higher brain function, which will likely be of medical interest.
No, what'll be more "histericcal" is how leading Intelligent Design pushers/Creationists will spin yet another blow to their superstition.
I have first decipherd it and then re-calculated the output. Put that data through several checks and the outcome was 42.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Will he look like Brendan Fraser?
I fail to see what position you are attempting to argue from. Are you trying to discredit my statement that researchers will disprove false statements by highlighting an event in which researchers disproved false statements? Or, perhaps, you are trying to argue that scientific inquiry is flawed because there is imperfection in humanity that must be recognized and overcome manually?
Either way, your argument is fatally flawed and nonsensical. You could just as well argue that knowledge of phsyics is fatally flawed because of the proposal of aether. Yet, here we are, a space-faring species of life that can even peer nearly to the edge of universe. For a group of people who must, by your argument, be so wholly ignorant of light's properties, we sure do manage and exploit it pretty well, wouldn't you agree?
Any argument against evolution that relies on mistakes and lies from the past - especially those that have been recognized and corrected - is as patently ridiculous as it gets. Your argument is logically absurd, and if you continue to press it, I propose that you too might well be absurd and your opinion on the matter be little more valuable to rational people than that of a diseased chimpanzee.
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
The closest living relative to human beings is not the common chimpanzee. It's the bonobo, also known as the pigmy chimpanzee. Interesting creatures, with even more interesting sex lives.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
They already cloned a Neanderthal... his first words were "Atuk zug-zug Alana"
Uuuups! Sorry didn't do that on purpose - that's just what happens, when you live to close the dutch border!
I, for one, welcome our Neandertal DNA overlords.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Here's some background that isn't apparent from the article. The CNN piece talks about Neanderthals in the context of understanding brain evolution, but the million dollar question- in most scientists' minds- is whether Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred, after 500,000 years of separation. It seems at least possible: lions and tigers produce fertile offspring and they diverged 2 million years ago.
I have always had trouble understanding why some scientists flatly deny that interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans would have even been possible. Interbreeding between species seperated by longer periods of evolution than 2 million years is possible. Some boffins in Dubai actually managed to produce a living camel/lama hybrid. They had to use artificial insemenation but the result was a living hybrid (which they called a 'cama') and camels and lamas are seperated by 40 million years of evolution. It would seem to me that Neanderthals and modern humans probably could interbreed, in light of what history tells us about human nature it would be strange if they didn't and the only question is: Would the resulting individuals have been fertile? If they weren't it might explain why no Neanderthal DNA has survived in the modern human genome. I will certainly be interested in whether or not this DNA mapping/reconstruction effort succeeds.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
".. they lived almost exclusively on a diet of roast duck with mango salsa."
For those of you unAmerican types, or anyone who doesn't watch much TV, this is from a Geico auto insurance commercial.
Neanderthals mispronounced it as "nuke-you-lurr", opposed embryonic stem cell research, and weren't big fans of evolution either.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
People have been trying to get mammoths going for at least fifteen years: my alma mater, Colorado State University, had what they thought was a successful fertilization of a frozen mammoth egg by a frozen mammoth sperm, but the implantation into an elephant was not successful. I think full-on cloning: enucleation and transplantation, sounds viable. I was just reading about a new cloning technique that's more efficent and 10x cheaper that seems promising.
*mammoths*. That'd rock so very, very much.
In a broader context, it would also help slow species loss, although obviously it doesn't help at all with the vast number of species we have yet to identify. (And as many people have pointed out, it also might act to discourage species conservation: it does us no good to bring back thylacines if there is no habitat for them, which is a real concern for mammoths. Where the hell do you put something bigger than an elephant, that likes cold weather and can stomp volkswagens into tinfoil? Wait until greenland melts more and stick them on some previously uninhabited island exposed by the receding glaciers?)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My good sir grandparent, you have been told. Well done!
Jeremy
But can you just imagine a Beowulf clu... uh, wait. On second thought, nevermind.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Well actually (credientials: BSc physical anthropology) there is still quite a bit of debate as to whether or not they interbred with us. This is why you will sometimes see them referred to as Homo neanderthalensis, and sometimes as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. There is evidence for both. I argued in an undergrad paper that it was biologically possible, but due to cultural and ecological reasons hardly ever happened. Which, in biology, is often enough to designate species (rather than subspecies) status.
Jeremy
Five bucks says he says he pronounces "Nuclear" as "Nucular". Any takers?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Ewwwww! Your neighbor sprays DNA all around his house, not just on his keyboard?!?
Why would anyone waste time on contaminated DNA from long dead Neanderthals when actual living Neanderthals exist?
Just visit the local chapter of the Republican party. It has plenty of Neanderthals -- with fresh DNA.
If there were living Neanderthals they wouldn't want to be associated with American politicans. (The same applies to Chimps and Bonobos...)
Wow, they can decode 40,000 year old DNA that's all mixed up with other stuff and we couldn't convict O.J. based on those samples??????
Well, creationists have been claiming that neanderthals were actually just humans. Enough DNA studies have been done on neanderthals to show that human mitochondrial DNA and neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is actually rather different - much smaller than the difference between humans and chimps, but different enough to show that humans and neanderthals were separate linages who didn't interbreed to any significant degree (and probably not at all).
The ability to interbreed (and the firtility of any offspring) is a factor of nuclear DNA though. Though both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA mutate randomly observed mutations tend to be non random since any mutation which breaks either an organelle or a cell dosn't last too long. In order for a non fatal mutation to be passed on it also has to occur in the right cells...
Oh for the motherfucking love of God please stop making every single conversation regarding science a political diatribe you loony leftist asshat
A Haiku: my language choices/assembler pascal lisp c/old school programmer
My comment about mitochondrial DNA was refering to the fact that neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has variations that human mitochondrial DNA does not. Your mitochondrial DNA is very similar to your mothers mitochondrial DNA. Based on that, we can make statements about whether or not you are her descendent. Since neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has variations and mutations that are not found in humans, it means that there was very little interbreeding going on (perhaps there was a little bit, but it has been lost in the subseqent millenia). No humans have ever been found that have neanderthal-type mitochondrial DNA.
t ml
Comparing mtDNA of these Neanderthals to mtDNA of living people from various continents, researchers have found that the Neanderthals' mtDNA is not more closely related to that of people from any one continent over another. This was an unwelcome finding for anthropologists who believe that there was some interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans living in Europe (which might have helped to explain why modern Europeans possess some Neanderthal-like features); these particular anthropologists instead would have expected the Neanderthals' mtDNA to be more similar to that of modern Europeans than to that of other peoples. Moreover, the researchers determined that the common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens lived as long as 500,000 years ago, well before the most recent common mtDNA ancestor of modern humans. This suggests (though it does not prove) that Neanderthals went extinct without contributing to the gene pool of any modern humans. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/neanderthals/mtdna.h
Some anthropologists have argued that people evolved at least partly from the Neanderthals. The opposing theory is that modern humans evolved in Africa, then spread outward, overwhelming earlier hominids including Neanderthals. The short, squat Neanderthals inhabited much of Europe from about 100,000 years ago until dying out about 28,000 years ago. "Neanderthal DNA is distinct from modern humans," Goodwin says, "and there are no examples of humans having Neanderthal-type DNA." http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Goodwin_00.html
Since when did Neanderthals start using the term "asshat?"
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
This absolutely astounds me! All of this work to find out the DNA code of Neanderthal man. And why the hell did they use such an old sample? They could have used fresh material just by using any of the politicians inside the Washington Beltway! In fact, it's one of the only locations where Neanderthal man can be observed in his native habitat!
:)
Sheesh!
Do you know what God said when he created the second nigger? "Oh, shit! Burned another one!"
This really is a bad metaphor. Nobody is cracking any code, not even metaphorically speaking. The code was cracked in the 60s. What's actually happening is that people are still trying to recover the ciphertext.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I have to say I think you got caught on the wrong side of that debate, and long after some pretty powerful clues were available if this was recent. Take a look at Qafzeh. When you have sapiens and neanderthal living that close together for over 50,000 years without any evidence of drift between them, it's pretty hard for to see any possibility they were the same species. Human populations interbreed, and the harshest, most strict taboos against 'miscegenation,' brutally enforced upon pain of death and worse, have never been able to stop that from happening for small fractions of that time period.
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Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Not long after they learned to throw chairs.
Maybe instead of teaching the "theory" of evolution in backward states, we should just show them a bunch of old bone fossils, and tell them how old they are. It would be interesting to see what the response would be anyway.
That would be THEIR concern about US. After all, that's exactly what we did.
Well, you might be right. The environment has changed. The primary test of evolutionary fitness is now your ability to overcome birth control. You can do this via love of kids, religeous passion (Muslim or Catholic), or sheer stupidity. If the Neanderthals are even dumber than today's welfare moms, then they are more fit to survive.
What would a modern human who happened to carry a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA look like?
Possibly would have a preference or even partial dependancy on meat (Neanderthal was a carnivore),
for example might require supplements of substances like L-Carnitine. Would likely have a slightly larger
brain. Carnivores often have different social structures. Carnivores don't feel pain when "going for the
kill", Neanderthal took down big game with fairly primitive tools. Its likely Neanderthal speech was
different, such a person might have communication problems when it came to language, yet might be very
clever this is a species that lived in a hostile climate for 100's of thousands of years.
Happens such a thing exists, a condition where they can't find a gene or even a small set of genes
for it, statistics appear to require dozens of genes. Its called the autistic spectrum, a good
number of exceptional scientists and engineers fall in it or atleast close to it. The number of
physiological differences in autism are stunning, its defined by social issues, but really its
a condition that effects levels of virtually every substance in the body, perception of music
(perfect pitch), and so on.
Of course biologists always say "you can't prove it", and up till now they've been right. The Neanderthal
genome may contain a major shock, its not just that humans are hybrids, but that this fact is what set us
on the road to civilization. The language ability of one sub species combined with the cleverness of
another.
My study of biology in college has taught me that species designation means exactly nothing in determining whether two organisms can interbreed. Viable crosses between supposedly different species in the same genus are absurdly common in the animal kingdom (Is there any justification at all for multiple species in Canis?), and interbreeding of plants in different families is not unheard of. At most, I'm willing to believe that Neanderthals might have possessed some mutation that caused crosses to be sterile, but even that I'm rather skepitcal of, as it seems unlikely between two groups so recently differentiated. I rather suspect that hybrids and hybrid communities might simply make up the groups labeled "advanced neanderthals" by anthropologists.
Reminds me vaguely of an argument an unwelcome prosyletizer tried to push on me:
A. Everything the Bible says is true.
B. Because it is the word of God.
C. It is the word of God because it says so, and everything the Bible says is true.
While your statement on the perils of circular logic is correct, evolution took a long time to gain any sort of acceptance. During that time, evidence for the theory could not rely on the theory as backup. Unlike competing "theories", which rely on faith in the absence of evidence, evolution met a skeptical community that demanded evidence.
Is that if you clone neanderthals, put them in a park and charge tourist money to see them, then it is only a matter of time before they go beserk and start eating people.
No wait that's dinosaurs.
that humans first crowded out neanderthals because we were skinnier and could survive on less food, and only later developed speech and culture.
Or that our human ancestors were more murderously bloody-minded than their smarter, kinder, whiny Neanderthal neighbors.
I don't know why you say you can't determine the geneology of the fossil. There are clear morphological differences, and the burials are at different sites. If they weren't completely different species, I'd expect that you'd see some clear convergence, morphologically, considering the extraordinary time period we're talking about they should probably have converged completely by the end if there was any interbreeding at all - we are talking *thousands* of generations. But you just don't see that. They're every bit as distinct morphologically in the late period of the overlap as they were 50ky earlier. So far as Canis, without commenting on some of the more farflung species that are sometimes assigned to it that I am not personally very knowledgeable about, I'll comment just on the divide between wolves and domesticated dogs, as that's something I'm very familiar with. And yes, it's very debateable whether they should be considered different species, as they *can* interbreed without hybridisation. But if that were the end of the story, there would be no room for debate - they'd be the same species. Fact is it's more complicated than that. Although they can interbreed, there are very serious behavioural barriers to it, and knowledgeable and determined human intervention is required for it to happen. Their mating cycles are strongly determinative and almost completely incompatible, and even on the rare instances when they overlap, the responses just aren't in tune - the wolf will sooner kill the dog than mate with it. I'm not aware of any instances where grey wolves and domesticated dogs have interbred in the wild. It's a LOT of work to get them to do so in captivity. Red wolves and coyotes are a good deal easier to cross-breed, but it's still extremely uncommon. Still, show me two populations of these canines in close proximity for a century or more and it's very likely you'll find some evidence of interbreeding - morphological convergence even if I don't have the means to do DNA testing. Dog/coyote interbreeding in the wild, rare as it is, has been known to happen for a long time. Two human populations side by side for 50k years with no such evidence just seems utterly impossible to me, unless they really were completely separate species - much further apart than a domesticated dog and a grey wolf.
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In retrospect I think you're probably right, but i don't think the skeletal record is strong enough yet to make a strong conclusion. If hybrids were present in small numbers, we likely just haven't found a specimen yet because we don't have enough skeletons.
Jeremy