In a feat hailed as a major breakthrough, scientists have introduced Neanderthals to the digital age by piecing together more than 1 million units of DNA from our long-dead evolutionary cousins.
And with the aid of a new light-based sequencing method, the researchers are setting their sights on a goal once relegated to science fiction: deciphering the entire 3.2 billion-unit sequence of an extinct relative with whom we share at least 99.5 percent of our DNA.
The ongoing analysis may offer new insights into how we emerged from our evolutionary past while signaling “the dawn of Neanderthal genomics,” according to a group of collaborators led by Edward Rubin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
Based on the report in this week’s issue of the journal Science and an independent study in the journal Nature, humans and Neanderthals appear to have parted ways about a half million years ago – each species arising from an ancestral pool of perhaps a few thousand individuals.
Agreeing with previous genetic clues, Rubin’s study also suggests that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis engaged in little or no interbreeding after their evolutionary breakup despite possible encounters in prehistoric Europe before Neanderthals died out around 30,000 years ago.
Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who pioneered Neanderthal sequencing efforts and led the Nature study, promised a completed genome for our brawny but evolutionarily unlucky genetic cousin within two years.
For their research, both groups used 38,000-year-old bone fragments discovered in a Croatian cave. From fossil evidence at other European sites such as the Sierra de Atapeurca in northern Spain, researchers have estimated that humans and Neanderthals began diverging around 700,000 years ago. Juan Luis Arsuaga, a professor of paleontology at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, said the new DNA evidence fits in well with the emerging family tree. And despite his longing to have “even a drop of Neanderthal blood to connect me with those powerful Europeans of long ago,” as he wrote in 2003, he said the new research strengthens what he also surmised then: that the relationship “is strictly sentimental.”
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