Posted on 05/13/2010 5:53:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
How much do we, who are alive today, differ from our most recent evolutionary ancestors, the cave-dwelling Neanderthals, hominids who lived in Europe and parts of Asia and went extinct about 30,000 years ago? And how much do Neanderthals, in turn, have in common with the ape-ancestors from which we are both descended, the chimpanzees?
Although we are both hominids, the fossil record told us long ago that we differ physically from Neanderthals, in various ways. But at the level of genes and the proteins that they encode, new research published online May 6 in the journal Science reveals that we differ hardly at all. It also indicates that we both -- Neanderthals and modern humans -- differ from the chimps in virtually identical ways.
"The astonishing implication of the work we've just published," says Prof. Gregory Hannon, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), "is that we are incredibly similar to Neanderthals at the level of the proteome, which is the full set of proteins that our genes encode."
Collaboration with a paleogenetics pioneer
Hannon, who is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is well known for his work on small RNAs and RNA interference, was invited this past year to help examine Neandertal DNA by Dr. Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in paleogenetics, a field that employs genome science to study early humans and other Paleolithic-era creatures. In a separate paper, Pääbo's team today publishes in the same issue of Science the first complete genome sequence for Neandertal, an achievement that builds on work he has led since 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Genomics in Leipzig.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Also here :
“Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence; Most of us have some Neanderthal genes, study finds.”
Science so simple a caveman can do it.
You just knew someone was going to have to write it...so just be happy it's out of the way.
LOL!
I’m sorry, but that’s just BS. Neanderthal DNA is generally described as being about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee, meaning that they were s species difference from us and not a racial difference. Aside from everything else that explains the previously enigmatic lack of any evidence of crossbreeding despite the two groups having lived in close proximity long enough that there should have been a lot of it; we could no more interbreed with neanderthals than we could with horses or cows.
Where’s that image of the reconstruction of a juvenile neanderthal?
I see them on those insurance commercials all the time. They don’t look much different than us, although they are pretty sensitive about it.
If we are supposed to have some Neanderthal genes, why doesn’t their DNA sequence show some human (homo sapiens sapiens) genes?
How could it have just gone one way?
I just read an article several days ago that stated that they have found Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.
Thanks, that is spooky looking every time I see it.
That is a reconstruction from what is believed to be a hybrid skeleton, a cross between a human and a Neanderthal.
OMG Danny Bonaduce !
Even very standard sources like Plos-Biology are on record to the effect that the neanderthal made no detectable contribution to the genome of modern man. That’s before you even get started with Heinsohn’s timetables for erectus and the Neanderthal or anything radical like that. The ONLY possibility there is of our being related to hominids at all is the possibility that we might have been genetically re-engineered FROM one of them. There is no possibility of our having evolved from any of them.
They actually analyzed DNA from that specimen and it was pure Neanderthal DNA, totally different from ours.
I think that the point of the article stating that modern man had Neanderthal DNA was that there was crossbreeding going on, not that modern man was descended from Neanderthal.
I didn't know that. The skeleton is definately different.
I worry that we don't know as much about DNA as we think. I am beginning to think that there's more and we're missing something.
Got it in one. This is just more manufactured "research" to prove that "we are all brothers under the skin".
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