Gene map shows few links between us, Neanderthals

DAN VERGANO USA TODAY
13 February 2009
(c) Copyright 2009, Daily Record. All Rights Reserved.

An international team said Thursday that it has completed a draft genome -- or genetic blueprint - of Neanderthals, finding our extinct cousins made "very little, if any" contribution to human genes.

Team chief Svante Paabo, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, described the work as a 63 percent complete gene map. The genome was created from fossil DNA samples, 37,000 to 70,000 years old, taken from four Neanderthals found in Europe.

Neanderthals occupied Europe from about 800,000 to 30,000 years ago. Scholars have long argued over their extinction and their relationship to people.

"We see this as a tool for future biologists (looking for) what's really unique to modern humans," Paabo said in a webcast.

"I think it is spectacular to get something out of bones 40,000 years old," says anthropologist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah.

The results confirm that Neanderthals and early humans separated, to Europe and Africa respectively, about 800,000 years ago. They find:

• Humans and Neanderthals share a speech gene, but not the gene that regulates human brain size.
  
• A "tiny" possibility of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.
  
• Uniformity suggesting the Neanderthals, like humans, arose from a small population.

Gene maps of extinct creatures have served as tune-ups for the Neanderthal effort. But Paabo threw water on the question of whether the genome would enable cloning of Neanderthals. "I would say starting with just DNA, it is and will remain impossible. But we can all speculate as much as we like."