Neandertal Genome Study Reveals That We Have a Little Caveman in Us
Thursday, May 6, 2010 - 19:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Researchers sequencing Neandertal DNA have concluded that between 1 and 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans.A team of scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig pieced together the first draft of the sequence--which represents about 60 percent of the entire genome--using DNA obtained from three Neandertal bones that come from Vindija cave in Croatia and are more than 38,000 years old. The researchers detail their analysis of the sequence in the May 7 Science. [More] Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology - Neandertal - DNA - Africa - Neanderthal