I agree...this is more down my line of thinking.
Milford's recent book, Race And Human Evolution, does a good job of explaining this theory.
A Fatal Attraction
Posted on 07/24/2006 11:41:28 AM PDT by doc30
BERLIN — U.S. and German scientists have launched a two-year project to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal, a feat they hope will help deepen understanding of how modern humans' brains evolved.
Neanderthals were a species that lived in Europe and western Asia from more than 200,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago. Scientists from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology are teaming up a company in Connecticut to map the genome, or humans' DNA code.
“The Neanderthal is the closest relative to the modern human, and we believe that by sequencing the Neanderthal we can learn a lot,” said Michael Egholm, a vice-president at 454 Life Sciences Corp. of Branford, Conn., which will use its high-speed sequencing technology in the project.
There are no firm answers yet about how humans picked up key traits such as walking upright and developing complex language. Neanderthals are believed to have been relatively sophisticated, but lacking in humans' higher reasoning functions.
The Neanderthal project follows scientists' achievement last year in deciphering the DNA of the chimpanzee, our closest living relative. That genome map produced a long list of DNA differences between humans and chimps and some hints about which differences might be crucial.
The chimp genome “led to literally too many questions, there were 35 million differences between us and chimpanzees – that's too much to figure out,” 454 chairman Jonathan Rothberg said in a telephone interview.
“By having Neanderthal, we'll really be able to home in on the small percentage of differences that gave us higher cognitive abilities,” he said. “Neanderthal is going to open the box. It's not going to answer the question, but it's going to tell where to look to understand all of those higher cognitive functions.”
Over two years, the scientists aim to reconstruct a draft of the three-billion building blocks of the Neanderthal genome – working with fossil samples from several individuals.
They face the complication of working with 40,000-year-old samples, and of filtering out microbial DNA that contaminated them after death.
Only about 5 per cent of the DNA in the samples is actually Neanderthal DNA, Mr. Egholm said, but he and Mr. Rothberg said pilot experiments had convinced them that the decoding was feasible.
At the Max Planck Institute, the project also involves Svante Paabo, who nine years ago participated in a pioneering, though smaller-scale, DNA test on a Neanderthal sample.
That study suggested that Neanderthals and humans split from a common ancestor a half-million years ago and backed the theory that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end.
The new project will help in understanding how characteristics unique to humans evolved and “will also identify those genetic changes that enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world,” Mr. Paabo said in a statement Thursday.
How do scientists arrive at this conclusion? Neanderthals did produce works of art and buried their dead with flowers . That appears to me to be a good demonstration of abstract thinking.
Yes, they going to be shocked when they find out we are all Neanderthals! LOL! I had to laugh about the 35 million genetic differences from chimps, they did however find that lawyers have only 12 million genetic differences from lab rats.
Wake me when you actually discover something. Sheesh.
Do you not see the direct conflict between those statements? Where will the "actual discoveries" come from, without devoting time and money towards things that were unproductive at the start?
It is quite another thing however if they were to go "dad look i grabbed the laces. Dad look I figured out which way to loop it. Dad look I made the first bow. Dad look I see where I have to twist the bow. Dad look I figuroud out how to pull on the string. etc. etc.
A far more common complaint about scientists is that they "sit in their ivory tower" and fail adequately to communicate their progress to the public (read: voters (read: taxpayers)). Can't please everybody, I guess.
They get the DNA they're using from teeth, but I think they can only get mitochondrial DNA from fossils this old.
I've got a feeling you're right. Classifying Neanderthals as another species might be like trying to classify redheads as another species. The results of this mapping could get interesting.
Ah, the Proxmire effect. The tiny fraction we spend on science becomes the whipping boy while trillions evaporate into fraud, waste, pork and indolence. Why is science always the target?
Politicians do it because they want to present themselves as budget-conscious, even while they bleed the public coffers dry. Others do it because they hate the science, and fear what it may reveal.
This project is unfortunatley fraught with technical difficulties due to the fact that there are no neanderthals around to provide sample.
Any estimates as to what the genetic differences will be?
One would expect between Chimp/Ape and man, closer (very close) to man in terms of sequence homologies.
But they will never get to the level for any sort of reliable large number of seqences to provide much info at all.
Yeah, that's my thought. But good luck to 'em.
I haven't heard the term "luddite" in a long time. At my very first job out of college a bunch of us used to say that management was full of "Luddites and Quislings".
Milford Wolpoff multiregional evolution makes more sense:
Multiregional evolution and the punctuated equilibrium theory Wolpoff suggests that after an African origin of Homo sapiens (including Homo ergaster/Homo erectus), local evolutionary events took place across the world (Africa, Europe, Asia, and when they were advantageous, they spread everywhere else. According to Wolpoff, populations of Homo evolved together as a single species. Change in Pleistocene populations did not involve speciation (the splitting of one species onto two): all this time, the geographically distinct populations maintained small amounts of gene flow. This idea directly challenges the Out of Africa model, which claims Homo sapiens evolved recently as a new species in Africa, and then dispersed throughout the Old World, replacing the existing human populations without mixing with them. In an earlier example of punctuated evolution preceding the global diffusion of Homo sapiens genes from Africa, some two million years ago, Wolpoff points to evidence of an earlier 'genetic revolution' that took place in a small group isolated from australopithecine forebears. "The earliest H. sapiens remains differ significantly from australopithecines in both size and anatomical details," he notes. "Insofar as we can tell, these changes were sudden and not gradual."
as far as DNA of the Neaderthal goes...there has been very little collected to prove or disprove either theory
I agree...this is more down my line of thinking.
Milford's recent book, Race And Human Evolution, does a good job of explaining this theory.
A Fatal Attraction
Pernicious Gnosiophobia. And most pork projects exhibit concrete objects to show that something was accomplished (the Big Dig, eg.)
How is it funny?
Hey! My Dad worked for the NACA during the war! A lot of good "stuff" has come from the NACA/NASA. But I think the space shuttle is too expensive, and that a lot of the work it does could be accomplished with robotics for less money. Still, there's much to be said for having a"hands on" human involved.
Ok I get it. Neanderthal is going to "open the box" even though there is much very educated and scientific documentation that Neanderthal is not even related to us, quite the contrary. Does this mean that we just didn't look in the right "box?" So we did swing from trees or didn't? Everybody started out black (even though Neanderthals have never been traced to the African continent). Neanderthal is related to us or isn't? All I want to know is if my g-g grandaddy X 50 was a monkey or a Viking. The story keeps changing and everybody has a good explanation why. Junk science? Nahhhhh, surely not! Where in the "box" shall we look for the next absolute answer? LOL!
I dunno. There was a report here a few days ago about DNA from a 400,000 year old horse tooth. The mammoth we will get, because they're frozen. Are there any frozen Neanderthals? Or ones preserved in acidic bogs? I predict we will get some very nice complete genes, and maybe eventually an almost complete genome. Have there been any reports as to Chromosome Number? The information will be priceless.
Frozen corpses.
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