[Bon mots]

So now we’ll know if red hair really did come from Neanderthals.

[Defiant]

Research suggests that the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and humans lived about 660,000 years ago.

Modern humans and neanderthals apparently did not interbreed. I went into the issue thinking that there probably was some relationship, judging by the body type of certain regions, but the evidence is pretty conclusive. Neanderthals left Africa half a million years before modern humans, and when Cro Magnons got to Europe, they did not interbreed. Whether they interacted, we don't know, and maybe never will, but my bet is that there were territorial battles that our kind won, and which led to Neanderthals' ultimate demise.

[djf]

I don’t think mitochondrial DNA has any impact on hair color.

It’s interesting that one of the theories of aging has to do with a reduced ability of mitochondria to repair themselves, because their DNA degrades.

But cellular, nuclear DNA has much better repair tools. And in fact out of the couple hundred genomes needed for the mitochondria, only about 19 actually are in the mitochondria, the rest are already in the nucleus.

So the theory is that by using viral vectors, the DNA that is prone to breaking and resequencing could be copied into the nucleus.

It’ll take more than that for somebody to ever get to their four hundredth birthday.
But not much.

We know what aging is. And soon we will be able to prevent and even reverse it.