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."

Comments

Re:I wish they would instead do something more use

[brit74]

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.

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). A more extensive study, I'm sure, will reinforce this fact, and creationists will continue ignoring the facts as usual. Apparently, creationists don't like the idea of God creating such a human-like creature because it harms the uniqueness of human-beings, it also raises questions about why God would create a "dead-end" species such as the neanderthals. Of course, evolution has no problem with the existence of neanderthals as a separate species.