14 February 2009
Straits Times
(c) 2009 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
A DRAFT version of the Neanderthal genetic blueprint has been mapped out, and this will make clearer the species' evolutionary relationship with humans.
The blueprint will also help to identify the genetic changes that enabled modern humans to leave Africa and rapidly spread around the world about 100,000 years ago.
Neanderthals were the closest relatives of currently living humans. They lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago.
The work was done by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and 454 Life Sciences Corporation in the United States.
The researchers sequenced more than one billion DNA fragments extracted from three Croatian Neanderthal fossils, using novel methods developed for this project, said the institute in a statement.
The effort was announced during the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.
The project - made possible with financing from the Max Planck Society - is headed by Professor Svante Paabo, director of the institute's department of evolutionary genetics anthropology.
For more than 100 years, palaeontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover the evolutionary relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans.
The latest DNA sequences of the Neanderthal can now be compared to the previously sequenced human and chimpanzee genomes, to look at how the genome of this extinct form differed from that of modern humans, said the institute.
One essential element developed by the group was the production of sequencing libraries under 'clean room' conditions to avoid contamination of experiments by human DNA, it said.
Dr Paabo has organised a consortium of researchers from around the world who will look at many genes which played a role in recent human evolution - such as FOXP2, which is involved in speech and language in modern humans.
Other genes of interest include the Tau locus and the microcephalin-1, which are implicated in brain ageing and development, respectively.
Scientists had earlier unearthed evidence that Neanderthals diverged from the ancestors of modern humans or Homo sapiens more than 450,000 years ago.
They also found fresh genetic evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans inter-bred, with modern humans mating with Neanderthal females to father children.
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