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

[Bowling Moses]

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.