DNA From Neanderthal Relative May Shake Up Human Family Tree

sciencehabit writes: In a remarkable technical feat, researchers have sequenced DNA from fossils in Spain that are about 300,000 to 400,000 years old and have found an ancestor—or close relative—of Neanderthals. The nuclear DNA, which is the oldest ever sequenced from a member of the human family, may push back the date for the origins of the distinct ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans.

Comments

Re:Very cool research

[ColdWetDog]

If you're interested, Svante Paablo (Nice work with that Unicode, Slashdot) has a book about the science (and engineering) of paleo DNA sequencing. Pretty amazing hard core work.

Re:Wait

[ColdWetDog]

And to make it harder, the concept of a species is fluid and artificial. It's not like Homo Neanderthalis just popped up de novo. There were undoubtedly populations of mixed breeds, localized variants and quite possibly early politicians rummaging around the oyster middens. Our fossil record is incredibly incomplete so even small additions to the database are likely to change our views on things dramatically.

Hopefully, as techniques improve we will be able to get more data from older fossils, fossils that are poorly preserved and fossils that are in collections where the curators haven't allowed for destructive sampling. The entire field has benefited enormously from pushing the sequencing technology forward.