The Minority Report

I was actually glad to hear this report on NPR this morning. There have been some that theorize that one of the reasons Neanderthals disappeared was they were interbred into extinction with Homo Sapiens^W at the time. Now that the genes have been sequenced, it would seem that theory can finally be put to rest.

It’s also interesting that the can identify a speech and language gene, as they have put together cool recreations of possible Neanderthal windpipes that suggest that Neanderthals were physically capable of speech. Large braincase, speech gene, windpipe…it’s all adding up.

The new gene map, which is the result of two and a half years spent analyzing a tiny fragment of Neanderthal bone from Croatia, suggests that humans and Neanderthals began to diverge genetically from a common ancestor about 800,000 years ago. The two populations co-existed but were genetically distinct by 300,000 years ago, according to the scientists.

Scientists Finish First Draft Of Neanderthal Genome : NPR

Researchers used DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian fossils to map out more than 60 percent of the entire Neanderthal genome by sequencing three billion bases of DNA.

The analysis showed it is highly unlikely that much interbreeding occurred as there was “very little, if any” Neanderthal contribution to the human gene pool, said lead researcher Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute.

But it also revealed that our Neanderthal cousins may have been closer to us than we thought: they share a gene which plays a key function in speech and language.

Scientists map Neanderthal genome