Oldest Fossil Protein Sequenced [from Neanderthal]

An international team, led by researchers at the Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, have extracted and sequenced protein from a Neanderthal from Shanidar Cave, Iraq dating to approximately 75,000 years old. It is rare to recover protein of this age, and remarkable to be able to determine the constituent amino acid sequence. This is the oldest fossil protein ever sequenced. Protein sequences may be used in a similar way to DNA, to provide information on the genetic relationships between extinct and living species. As ancient DNA rarely survives, this new method opens up the possibility of determining these relationships in much older fossils which no longer contain DNA (PNAS Online Early Edition, March 8, 2005).

The research, published in PNAS, presents the sequence for the bone protein osteocalcin from a Neanderthal from Shanidar Cave, Iraq, as well as osteocalcin sequences from living primates (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans). The team found that the Neanderthal sequence was the same as modern humans. In addition, the team found a marked difference in the sequences of Neanderthals, human, chimpanzee and orangutan from that of gorillas, and most other mammals. This sequence difference is at position nine, where the crystalline amino acid hydroxyproline is replaced by proline (an amino acid that is found in many proteins). The authors suggest that this is a dietary response, as the formation of hydroxyproline requires vitamin C, which is ample in the diets of herbivores like gorillas, but may be absent from the diets of the omnivorous primates such as humans and Neanderthals, orangutans and chimpanzees. Therefore, the ability to form proteins without the presence of vitamin C may have been an advantage to these primates if this nutrient was missing from the diets regularly, or from time to time.

This research opens up the exciting possibility of extracting and sequencing protein from other fossils, including earlier humans, as a means of determining the relationships between extinct and living species, and to better understand the phylogenetic relationships.

I thought this was related to the much touted lack of human's and guinea pig's ability to sythesize vitamin C.

It is related to that. For primates not having that ability, the new protein is better.

And therefore I assumed that Neanderthal had it and the rest of us didn't.

Neanderthal was probably in the same boat, no ability to synthesize vitamin C. You certainly had your blinders in place when reading that article.

So if it's something Human's had all along, and we don't have any proof that human's ever lacked it. They why are we assuming that Human's EVOLVED it?

Hmmm? Humans still have the pseudogene remnant of their former ability to synthesize vitamin C. Hello?

The scenario runs something like this. Non-primate mammals (with some exception, like said guinea pig) had the ability to synthesize ascorbic acid, an important intermediate compound for connective tissue growth and repair. The mammalian radiation created a group of tree-dwelling, fruit-eating mammals called primates. Fruit has lots of vitamin C in it. If your population lives by eating fruit all day, you could lose the ability of synthesize vitamin C and never notice for generations and generations. That happened.

Some primate groups eventually stopped eating so much fruit. They noticed a susceptibility to a new form of malnutrition. We call it "scurvy."

Cutting vitamin C out of the loop to form osteocalcin was an advantage for the new omnivorous primates. They seemed to have hit this mutation early. At any rate, humans, orangs, neanderthals, and chimps all have the new osteocalcin.

I don't see how you can say there's no evidence. We have lots of molecular studies now. This is just another one on a large and growing pile.

You're trying to make a science out of being dumb as a post, Danny. That doesn't go anywhere good.

I saw an article some time ago that compared human DNS to the Neanderthal and found there was no possibility of any relationship.

The only molecular studies prior to this one used mtDNA. mtDNA has a few limitations from the way it goes down from mother to child with no sexual recombination. You can't use mtDNA to show that you're related to your daddy, for instance.

Neanderthal was a beast related to no other creature on earth.

No molecular study shows anything of the sort. The mtDNA studies do tend to show that neanderthals were not our direct ancestors but more of an "uncle" group. However, even that is not clear due to the matrilineal limitation.

Some say we have 98% of the genes of a chimpanzee bur they have not sequenced a chimp so that is a guess. I like the one that we have 70% of the DNA of a carrot!

We are more related to chimps than chimps are to orangutans or gorillas. That's not a guess.

I found this research, about crude oil not exclusively being a product of the buried forest/animal theory, but is really primarily a by product of great heat and pressure on rocks (magma) from very deep in the earth near the matle. I will send the other articles, as I have time to capture and send them……..quite convincing……..hmmmm

September 26, 1995, the New York Times ran an article headlined "Geochemist Says Oil Fields May Be Refilled Naturally." Penned by Malcolm W. Browne, the piece appeared on page C1.
" Could it be that many of the world's oil fields are refilling themselves at nearly the same rate they are being drained by an energy hungry world? A geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts ... Dr. Jean K. Whelan ... infers that oil is moving in quite rapid spurts from great depths to reservoirs closer to the surface. Skeptics of Dr. Whelan's hypothesis ... say her explanation remains to be proved ...

Discovered in 1972, an oil reservoir some 6,000 feet beneath Eugene Island 330 [not actually an island, but a patch of sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico] is one of the world's most productive oil sources ... Eugene Island 330 is remarkable for another reason: it's estimated reserves have declined much less than experts had predicted on the basis of its production rate. "It could be," Dr. Whelan said, "that at some sites, particularly where there is a lot of faulting in the rock, a reservoir from which oil is being pumped might be a steady-state system -- one that is replenished by deeper reserves as fast as oil is pumped out" ...

The discovery that oil seepage is continuous and extensive from many ocean vents lying above fault zones has convinced many scientists that oil is making its way up through the faults from much deeper deposits ... A recent report from the Department of Energy Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development concluded from the Woods Hole project that "there new data and interpretations strongly suggest that the oil and gas in the Eugene Island field could be treated as a steady-state rather than a fixed resource." The report added, "Preliminary analysis also suggest that similar phenomena may be taking place in other producing areas, including the deep-water Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan North Slope" ... There is much evidence that deep reserves of hydrocarbon fuels remain to be tapped."

Eugene Island story was revisited by the media three-and-a-half years later, by the Wall Street Journal (Christopher Cooper "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning," Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1999). (http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm)
Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330.
"Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while. it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.

Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago.

All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be. ...

Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts ... says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating" deep underground. ... About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, the underwater landscape surrounding Eugene Island is otherworldly, cut with deep fissures and faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil."

Exactly three years later (to the day), the media once again paid a visit to the Gulf of Mexico. This time, it was Newsday that filed the report (Robert Cooke "Oil Field's Free Refill," Newsday, April 19, 2002). (http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pkt/2002II/msg00071.html)
"Deep underwater, and deeper underground, scientists see surprising hints that gas and oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again, sometimes rapidly.
Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing evidence from the Gulf of Mexico suggests that some old oil fields are being refilled by petroleum surging up from deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low. ..
. chemical oceanographer Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt [said] "They are refilling as we speak. But whether this is a worldwide phenomenon, we don't know" ...
Kennicutt, a faculty member at Texas A&M University, said it is now clear that gas and oil are coming into the known reservoirs very rapidly in terms of geologic time. The inflow of new gas, and some oil, has been detectable in as little as three to 10 years. In the past, it was not suspected that oil fields can refill because it was assumed that oil was formed in place, or nearby, rather than far below.
According to marine geologist Harry Roberts, at Louisiana State University ... "You have a very leaky fault system that does allow it (petroleum) to migrate in. It's directly connected to an oil and gas generating system at great depth." ...
"There already appears to be a large body of evidence consistent with ... oil and gas generation and migration on very short time scales in many areas globally" [Jean Whelan] wrote in the journal Sea Technology ...
Analysis of the ancient oil that seems to be coming up from deep below in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that the flow of new oil "is coming from deeper, hotter [sediment] formations" and is not simply a lateral inflow from the old deposits that surround existing oil fields, [Whelan] said."

Reaction to the publication of the Kenney study was swift. First to weigh in was Nature (Tom Clarke "Fossil Fuels Without the Fossils: Petroleum: Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?," Nature News Service, August 14, 2002).
"Petroleum - the archetypal fossil fuel - couldn't have formed from the remains of dead animals and plants, claim US and Russian researchers. They argue that petroleum originated from minerals at extreme temperatures and pressures. Other geochemists say that the work resurrects a scientific debate that is almost a fossil itself, and criticize the team's conclusions.
The team, led by J.F. Kenney of the Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas, mimicked conditions more than 100 kilometres below the earth's surface by heating marble, iron oxide and water to around 1500° C and 50,000 times atmospheric pressure.
They produced traces of methane, the main constituent of natural gas, and octane, the hydrocarbon molecule that makes petrol. A mathematical model of the process suggests that, apart from methane, none of the ingredients of petroleum could form at depths less than 100 kilometres."
The geochemist community, and the petroleum industry, were both suitably outraged by the publication of the study. The usual parade of experts was trotted out, of course, but a funny thing happened: as much as they obviously wanted to, those experts were unable to deny the validity of the research. So they resorted to a very unusual tactic: they reluctantly acknowledged that oil can indeed be created from minerals, but they insisted that that inconvenient fact really has nothing to do with the oil that we use.

In June 2003, Geotimes paid a visit to the Gulf of Mexico ("Raining Hydrocarbons in the Gulf"), and the story grew yet more compelling.
http://www.geotimes.org/june03/NN_gulf.html
"Below the Gulf of Mexico, hydrocarbons flow upward through an intricate network of conduits and reservoirs ... and this is all happening now, not millions and millions of years ago, says Larry Cathles, a chemical geologist at Cornell University. "We're dealing with this giant flow-through system where the hydrocarbons are generating now, moving through the overlying strata now, building the reservoirs now and spilling out into the ocean now," Cathles says. ...
Cathles and his team estimate that in a study area of about 9,600 square miles off the coast of Louisiana [including Eugene Island 330], source rocks a dozen kilometers [roughly seven miles] down have generated as much as 184 billion tons of oil and gas -- about 1,000 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent. "That's 30 percent more than we humans have consumed over the entire petroleum era," Cathles say. "And that's just this one little postage stamp area; if this is going on worldwide, then there's a lot of hydrocarbons venting out."

Dry oil wells spontaneously refilling? Oil generation and migration systems? Massive oil reserves miles beneath the earth's surface? Spontaneous venting of enormous volumes of gas and oil? (Roberts noted that - and this isn't really going to please the environmentalists, but I'm just reporting the facts, ma'am - "natural seepage" in areas like the Gulf of Mexico "far exceeds anything that gets spilled" by the oil industry. And those natural emissions have been pumped into our oceans since long before there was an oil industry.)

.
Coverage by New Scientist of the 'controversial' journal publication largely mirrored the coverage by Nature (Jeff Hecht "You Can Squeeze Oil Out of a Stone," New Scientist, August 17, 2002).
"Oil doesn't come from dead plants and animals, but from plain old rock, a controversial new study claims.
The heat and pressure a hundred kilometres underground produces hydrocarbons from inorganic carbon and water, says J.F. Kenney, who runs the Gas Resources Corporation, an oil exploration firm in Houston. He and three Russian colleagues believe all our oil is made this way, and untapped supplies are there for the taking.
Petroleum geologists already accept that some oil forms like this. "Nobody ever argued that there are no inorganic sources," says Mike Lewan of the US Geological Survey. But they take strong issue with Kenney's claim that petroleum can't form from organic matter in shallow rocks."
Geotimes chimed in as well, quoting Scott Imbus, an organic geochemist for Chevron Texaco Corp., who explained that the Kenney research is "an excellent and rigorous treatment of the theoretical and experimental aspects for abiotic hydrocarbon formation deep in the Earth. Unfortunately, it has little or nothing to do with the origins of commercial fossil fuel deposits."

What we have here, quite clearly, is a situation wherein the West's leading geochemists (read: shills for the petroleum industry) cannot impugn the validity of Kenney's unassailable mathematical model, and so they have, remarkably enough, adopted the unusual strategy of claiming that there is actually more than one way to produce oil. It can be created under extremely high temperatures and pressures, or it can be created under relatively low temperatures and pressures. It can be created organically, or it can be created inorganically. It can be created deep within the Earth, or it can be created near the surface of the Earth. You can make it with some rocks. Or you can make it in a box. You can make it here or there. You can make it anywhere.

While obviously an absurdly desperate attempt to salvage the 'fossil fuel' theory, the arguments being offered by the geochemist community actually serve to further undermine the notion that oil is an irreplaceable 'fossil fuel.' For if we are now to believe that petroleum can be created under a wide range of conditions (a temperature range, for example, of 75° C to 1500° C), does that not cast serious doubt on the claim that conditions favored the creation of oil just "one time in the earth's 4.5 billion year history"?

A more accurate review of Kenney's work appeared in The Economist ("The Argument Needs Oiling," The Economist, August 15, 2002).
" Millions of years ago, tiny animals and plants died. They settled at the bottom of the oceans. Over time, they were crushed beneath layers of sediment that built up above them and eventually turned into rock. The organic matter, now trapped hundreds of metres below the surface, started to change. Under the action of gentle heat and pressure, and in the absence of air, the biological debris turned into oil and gas. Or so the story goes.
In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons, the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney, an American who today works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr Kenney has evidence to support his argument.
In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have typically been found and plundered. He has developed a mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come into existence only at extremely high temperatures and pressures-far higher than those found in the earth's crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed.
To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500° C and crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil could be produced there from completely inorganic sources."
Kenney's theories, when discussed at all, are universally described as "new," "radical," and "controversial." In truth, however, Kenney's ideas are not new, nor original, nor radical. Though no one other than Kenney himself seems to want to talk about it, the arguments that he presented in the PNAS study are really just the tip of a very large iceberg of suppressed scientific research.

Even so: you'd be wrong that nobody cares. The petrochemical industry, and everybody who relies upon products of the petrochemical industry (that would be you, son), cares very much that the geologists get it right. And part of getting it right is understanding that the world is far older than 6000 years.

Sorry to hog the replies, but not everyone in the petrochemical industry agrees with the old age theory of the earth any more....... There is a lot of research out there that is not being discussed in certain circles of the scientific world........that needs to be considered...

There is no way there were that many critters to make that much oil and according to one of my posts the researcher makes a good point that those critters had to be a lot deeper than where the actual oil is found in order to even be converted to petroleum, because the conditions at those shallow levels would not be right for the conversion to occur.
There also is research showing that coal can form in a matter of months at rather shallow depths. Mt St Helen's for instance; Coal is already forming under the debri fields and at surprisingly shallow depths.
The rate of accumulation of lunar or space dust is approximated at 1/8" to 1/4" every 10,000 years. The reason for the large dia. landing pads on the lunar lander was because of the expected depth of the dust on the moon based on the moon's assumed age. Nasa was shocked when they only discovered at the max an average of 1/4" of lunar dust.
There is just to much conflicting science out there to accept that the earth is millions and millions of years old.
Back to Petrochemicals; The known natural rate of pressure depletion (loss) in unreleased gas fields flys in the face of the old earth theory. The gas pressures are currently to high to support old earth theory, suggesting a much younger earth.

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