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Neanderthal Genome Being Mapped


SilverCougar

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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.

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There're so many developments in these fields of science so frequently it's amazing, I guess that's what makes them so great. :yes:

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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?

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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...

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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.

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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.

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Well, looks like the human and neaderthal genome is 99.9% the same. No surprise...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 :blush: ) 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)

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