Neanderthal Yields Nuclear DNA

The first sequences of nuclear DNA to be taken from a Neanderthal have been reported at a US science meeting. Geneticist Svante Paabo and his team say they isolated the long segments of genetic material from a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil from Croatia.

The work should reveal how closely related the Neanderthal species was to modern humans, Homo sapiens.

Details were presented at a conference at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and reported by News@Nature.

It is a significant advance on previous research that has extracted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) specimens.

This genetic material is contained in structures that power cells; and although the information it holds is very useful, it is more limited in scope than the DNA bundled up at the cell's centre.

So far, Paabo and colleagues have managed to sequence around a million base-pairs, which comprises 0.03% of the Neanderthal's entire DNA "catalogue", or genome. Base-pairs are the simplest bonded chemical units which hold together the DNA double helix.

The genetic material comes from a 45,000-year-old male Neanderthal specimen found in Vindija Cave outside Zagreb, the News@Nature website reports.

* The double-stranded DNA molecule is held together by chemical components called bases
* Adenine (A) bonds with thymine (T); cytosine (C) bonds with guanine (G)
* These "letters" form the "code of life". There are estimated to be about 2.9 billion base-pairs in the human genome wound into 24 distinct bundles, or chromosomes
* Written in the DNA are 20-25,000 genes, which human cells use as starting templates to make proteins. These sophisticated molecules build and maintain our bodies
* Preliminary analysis shows the bundle of DNA responsible for maleness in the Neanderthal - its Y chromosome - is very different from modern human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes; more so than for the other chromosomes in the genome.

This might suggest that little interbreeding occurred between our own species and the Neanderthals.

Usually, DNA must be cloned in bacteria to produce large enough amounts to study. But Professor Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his team have used a novel sequencing method to decode the genetic material. This involves using tiny wells to directly sequence DNA fragments in an emulsion.

However, the researcher is also working to extract and read Neanderthal DNA by the traditional method. About 75,000 base-pairs have been sequenced this way so far. They show that Neanderthals diverged from the evolutionary line that led to modern humans about 315,000 years ago.

Neanderthals lived across Europe and parts of west and central Asia from approximately 230,000 to 29,000 years ago. It is unclear what factors led to their demise, but climate change and competition from modern humans may have played a role.

Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals
by Dr Damian Carrington
BBC News Online
Monday, 12 June, 2000
The extinction of the Neanderthals could have been caused by their choosy appetites - they ate virtually nothing but meat... "They were picky eaters," says Dr Paul Pettitt, at the University of Oxford, UK. "And this tells me that they are really unchanging - doing the same old thing year after year... Neanderthals were excellent hunters," Dr Petitt told BBC News Online. "But the issue that was at stake was whether they hunted every day of their lives or whether it was just a summer outing." ...The early humans themselves may have been better hunters than the Neanderthals, depriving them of their kills. Or the hunted animals may have been struck by disease or migrated away.

Neandertal WENT EXTINCT because he ate too much meat. Nothing political about that, eh?

I'm looking around for evidence of mtDNA recombination and its possible effect on the human genome and have found nothing so far. Panda's thumb talks about it,
"I asked Reed Cartright - a real biologist - to work out what effect paternal recombination of mtDNA means to Mitochondrial Eve. It turns out, as mathematical modeling often does, to be surprising. It makes very little difference at all. The following graph shows that until the rate of individual recombination is very high, paternal mtDNA does very little to estimates of mtEve.

The graph shows how the recombination of nuclear DNA affects estimates of the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA). 1e-8 (1 in 10 to the 8th power, or one in each 100 million) is the estimate for nuclear recombination rates. MTDNA rates are for many reasons many-fold less than this. So the effect is at worst minimal, and at best affects mtEve not at all."

Eskimo is the appropriate term for the wide range of Arctic dwellers from western Alaska to Greenland. Inuit is a linguistic term not appropriate for all those peoples. While it's been fashionable in liberal circles to claim offense in the name of various native peoples, I'm sure if I were a non-Inuit speaking Eskimo being called an Inuit is what would offend me.

Secondly, 45 years seems pretty good for a low tech people living in such an extreme environment. The traditional Arctic diet is a marvel (low cancer, heart disease, diabetes rates) and known to be nutrient rich and complete. Modern Eskimos do have diet problems, it's due to the introduction of the modern diet. Google up a few articles about it. One things for sure, there's a lot we don't know about proper human nutrition.

I searched using altavista and this is what I found:

Atkins proponents are fond of citing the Inuit (Eskimo) diet which is almost 100% animal protein/fat based and yet these indigenous people have very low levels of heart disease. What is not highlighted is the fact that the Inuit have low life-expectancy and one of the highest levels of osteoporosis in the world.
http://www.energygrid.com/health/2004/05ap-atkins.html

The health benefits abound. Much research was gathered by studying the Inuit diet with a ratio of n-6:n-3 of 1:2.5 and other cultures (Okinawa, Japan for example) that consumed much of their dietary fat from fish in the 6:1 ratios. The Inuit (Eskimo) diet consisted almost exclusively of meat (there is very little space to grow “greens or grains” in the Arctic) and their meat source was overwhelmingly from the sea. Hence, their intake of rather high ratios of n-3 FA gave them near insusceptibility against cardiovascular disease. Since about the turn of the last century our ratios have changed drastically to that of about 20:1 and as a consequence we suffer a grave n-3 FA deficiency. This dietary state happens to be a pro-inflammatory condition. There are very strong scientifically proven connections between diets low in n-3 FA and higher incidences of a number of diseases. They include cardiovascular disease. Heart attacks and strokes are more common in people not consuming enough of this essential FA. There is even a connection with multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia and depression, and even osteoporosis. http://www.jivemagazine.com/column.php?pid=2375

In a more recent study of Yupik Eskimos living in southwestern Alaska, scientists found an advantage to a diet high in salmon, marine mammals, and other sources of omega-3 fatty acids. These Eskimos succumbed to circulatory disease at only one-third the rate of those on modern Western diets in the United States. However, an important caveat is that these studies did not look at other factors, such as exercise levels, which are known to have an impact on heart disease. The Eskimo diet is extremely limited due to a lack of food diversity (particularly plants) in the harsh arctic environment, especially compared to the one around the East African lakes. However, another group of modern hunter-gatherers—the Australian Aborigines—consumes a more varied fare, from various vegetables and seeds to wild animals and fish. The Aborigines are of special interest to nutritionists because they show little or no evidence of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in their natural environment, yet suffer as much as the rest of us when adopting the diet and lifestyle of the West. Looking into the phenomenon, nutrition researchers Joan M. Naughton and Kerin O’Dea of the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Andrew J. Sinclair of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology traced the Aboriginal advantage to traditional foods, especially the levels and types of fat in their diet.

The scientists analyzed the traditional Aboriginal diet across a wide range of geographic regions, from the tropical coast of the north through the vast, arid center to the cooler climates of the south. The specific foods varied greatly, with some Aborigines getting as much as 64 percent of their calories from animal foods. But even in this last group, saturated fat in the diet is uniformly low and the essential fatty acid content, including omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, fairly high. This is because wild game have very little saturated fat and relatively high levels of essential fatty acids when compared to domesticated animals. This fatty acid profile is a consequence of the wild animal species’ consumption of wild plants containing high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids. This is analogous to the absence of omega-3 fatty acids in farm-raised fish versus wild fish if the “domesticated” fish are not fed nutrients from the sea. http://www.omegabrite.com/doc/book/03.pdf

Conclusion:

Western diet sucks.

I found something else that is interesting!

"The traditional Eskimo diet for most of the year subsists on almost no vegetables at all, but they get their vitamins from organ meats and things like eyeball which are a delicacy, or were."

"So, you don't really need it, but sure, vegetables are good for you and you should eat them. They are part of the diet that I would recommend, and that is where you'll get your vitamin C. I recommend Vitamin C supplements, I don't have anything against taking supplements, I use a lot of them."

If I may summarize, it appears western meat has insane amounts of the wrong saturated fat, almost no omega-3 and -6, and western people avoid eating the parts of the animals that have essential nutrients such as vitamins. http://www.angelfire.com/ny2/bass/rosedale2.html

Sure, Inuit/Eskimos may be on a 100% meat diet but it is like super meat compared to the mass produced slabs of fat and muscle that you find in a shop, and they STILL live way shorter than other people that live under similar primitive conditions.

If you want to eat 100% meat it is your decision but in light of the information above, perhaps some fruit with your meat would do well.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.