SilverCougar Posted November 15, 2006 #1 Share Posted November 15, 2006 http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/11/15/n...w19-502-ak-0000 Nov. 15, 2006 —A bone fragment that scientists had initially ignored has begun to yield secrets of the Neanderthal genome, launching a new way to learn about the stocky and muscular relative of modern humans, scientists say. Genetic material from the bone has let researchers identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far, and it should be enough to derive most of the creature's 3.3 billion blocks within the next two years, said researcher Svante Paabo. "We're at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics," said gene expert Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. Such research will "serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about the biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get" otherwise, Rubin said. And the Neanderthal data will shed light on what DNA changes helped produce modern humanity by revealing which changes appeared relatively late in human evolution, after the ancestors of Neanderthals and of humans split apart, scientists said. Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues present an initial analysis of Neanderthal DNA in this week's issue of the journal Nature. Rubin and his collaborators present their own analysis in this week's issue of Science. Both are based on DNA extracted from a bone fragment that lay in a Croatian cave for 38,000 years. "It's rather small and uninteresting and was thrown into a big box of uninformative bones" at a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, Paabo said. So it wasn't handled very much, which meant that its DNA was not extensively contaminated by that of modern-day people, a major plus for the new DNA work, he said. Only about one-seventh of an ounce or less of the bone will be enough to get a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome, he said. DNA analysis indicated that the bone fragment came from a male. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raptor Posted November 15, 2006 #2 Share Posted November 15, 2006 There're so many developments in these fields of science so frequently it's amazing, I guess that's what makes them so great. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roj47 Posted November 16, 2006 #3 Share Posted November 16, 2006 Excellent news, but... If Neanderthal man became extinct not through evolution, but being out competed by homo sapiens.... Then we are not comparing like for like? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverCougar Posted November 16, 2006 Author #4 Share Posted November 16, 2006 I think part of it is to see if Cro Magnion and Neanderthal interbred. If that's the case, then Neanderthal DNA would be apart of modern man... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyGTS Posted November 16, 2006 #5 Share Posted November 16, 2006 they did interbreed look at the NFL lol jk good find there cant wait to see what they come up with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seraphina Posted November 16, 2006 #6 Share Posted November 16, 2006 It says something about how tired I was that when I first read the title for this thread...I honest to goodness thought it was saying something about a "neranderthal gnome"... But anyway, good to hear. Hopefully they'll have something interesting to tell us in the next couple of years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Umbarger Posted November 17, 2006 #7 Share Posted November 17, 2006 I always thought of them as more along the lines of a different branch of the same tree, not a direct ancester. I wish that they could make this study happen faster. I'd really like to see what comes out of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frogfish Posted November 17, 2006 #8 Share Posted November 17, 2006 Well, looks like the human and neaderthal genome is 99.9% the same. No surprise... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hehe Posted November 19, 2006 #9 Share Posted November 19, 2006 (edited) Well, looks like the human and neaderthal genome is 99.9% the same. No surprise... Does that mean that Neanderthals were more human than many humans are today Variation between human DNA is 0.1-1%, most of it SNP's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome Would love to read the published article. Edited November 19, 2006 by Hehe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frogfish Posted November 19, 2006 #10 Share Posted November 19, 2006 As would I. If those figures are right, it seems so Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Umbarger Posted November 21, 2006 #11 Share Posted November 21, 2006 Does that mean that Neanderthals were more human than many humans are today Variation between human DNA is 0.1-1%, most of it SNP's That would mean that they e is less difference between them and us than there is between the different races on Earth today. This is something that I'm sure the Klan would love to hear. I'm sure they could use it to make even more hate/trash books. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyGTS Posted November 21, 2006 #12 Share Posted November 21, 2006 so if they are 99.9% the same that means they could interbreed and have fertile offspring right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leonardo Posted November 21, 2006 #13 Share Posted November 21, 2006 so if they are 99.9% the same that means they could interbreed and have fertile offspring right? That might be jumping the gun a little. I don't know how inter-species breeding viability is confirmed, but I think that proving this may require actually growing sex cells. There are certainly others on the forum with much better knowledge of this than me who could confirm this though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyGTS Posted November 21, 2006 #14 Share Posted November 21, 2006 lol got a little excited there. it would be neat if that were the case though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
frogfish Posted November 21, 2006 #15 Share Posted November 21, 2006 so if they are 99.9% the same that means they could interbreed and have fertile offspring right? Most likely. The general consensus is that Neanderthals and Humans were different sub species...Unless that is wrong, they most likely could breed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roj47 Posted November 22, 2006 #16 Share Posted November 22, 2006 That might be jumping the gun a little. I don't know how inter-species breeding viability is confirmed, but I think that proving this may require actually growing sex cells. There are certainly others on the forum with much better knowledge of this than me who could confirm this though. I would have to go hunting, but there has been a skeleton discovered with both modern man and nea (can't spell ) characteristics. The modern man was the dominant gene and won through in the end leaving no traces of nea man today. (bar some rugby players) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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