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

Sheesh..

[vancondo]

You people, with your 'facts' and 'figures'.. 40,000 year old samples?!

ridiculous.

Everybody knows that the earth is only 27 years old.

ad-word-tizzy

[wheatking]

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.

Definitive post on Neandertal Decoding

[kkamrani]

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.

Re:Definitive post on Neandertal Decoding

[jd]

Definitely interesting, highly contradictory though. The blog directly linked to claims that the neandertal DNA is being found in the bacteria - that the bacteria had somehow made it a part of its own DNA. This seems highly improbable. Bacterial DNA can do strange things, but absorbing large chunks of neandertal DNA is almost certainly not one of them.

The other descriptions imply that it's contamination through questionable extraction techniques - they're grinding up the fossils, so ALL the DNA in the sample will be mixed together, and strands may well end up getting broken, making it much harder to sequence correctly.

Sequencing fossil DNA is certainly possible, and is extremely desirable, but the approach seems... odd. The BBC article, for example, claims that they're going to look for the genes that differentiate modern humans from neandertals, such as mental capacity. Given that we don't fully understand what "mental capacity" actually means, or indeed what mental capacity neandertals actually had, they would need to be looking for an unknown difference to identify an entirely theoretical and totally unquantifiable distinction. That's not good science.

Lastly, we know from studies of neandertal mtDNA that there was a large genetic diversity. Far larger than had been suspected, prior to that study. If these scientists are taking neandertal nucleic DNA from significantly different regions and/or times, they cannot be certain that the nucleic DNA had not evolved or otherwise differed to the point where direct comparison or simple in-lining of the genes would make no sense whatsoever.

This is a good research project, but I am highly uncertain of their methods and am not convinced it will yield meaningful results. Because repeat studies will be difficult to do, this is an area where those involved HAVE to take extra care to put their results beyond question. This care is NOT being taken, based on what I'm seeing.

This is going to end badly

[iambarry]

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?

Re:This is going to end badly

[MrFlibbs]

Don't laugh. Richard Dawkins predicts that "the missing link" will be born by the middle of this century. He has an essay on this in a book titled "The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century". This is an interesting book consisting of 25 speculative essays by leading scientists in various fields.

Dawkins' argument is that Moore's Law will eventually make the sequencing of genomes cheap enough to be routine. He speculates that a large database of hominid genomes plus expected advances in gene manipulation would support the creation of pre-human DNA. Once this is done, an implanted embryo with the new DNA could be inserted into a human womb, and out pops the new (old?) species. If Dawkins is correct, then other non-human species such as Neanderthals are also potentially viable.

In the essay, Dawkins briefly discusses the moral implications of such a task. He concludes that any objections are easily overcome by the great service to mankind in proving the correctness of the Theory of Evolution.

According to their digestive enzymes...

[jpellino]

.. they lived almost exclusively on a diet of roast duck with mango salsa.

Details

[Raindance]

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. :)

Closest living relative?

[Bryansix]

chimpanzees, our closest living relative.

I don't know about you guys but my closest living relative is probably my mother or maybe my father.

Re:Neanderthal Man went extinct because...

[bcrowell]

...the evolution of DNA in Homo Sapiens gave them a larger and more complex brain,
Nope, the average neanderthal had a bigger brain than the average human. However, both neanderthals and our own ancestors don't appear to have achieved any real level of culture until relatively recently in history; their artifacts don't show any specialization or innovation over tens of thousands of years, and they all come from local stone, indicating a lack of trade. The onset of culture didn't have anything to do with an increase in brain size (which didn't change over that short period). It may have had to do with something like the foxp2 gene, which is crucial for developing complex language. It's possible to make up a lot of stories, and nobody knows which is right. It's possible, for example, that humans first crowded out neanderthals because we were skinnier and could survive on less food, and only later developed speech and culture.

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.