READING THE NEANDERTHAL CODE

Abstract

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER GENOME project. But this one is definitely not your average genome project. In fact, the species in question has been extinct for thousands of years. Last month, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, and 454 Life Sciences, in Branford, Conn., announced their plans to sequence the Neanderthal genome. The researchers, led by evolutionary anthropologist Svante Paabo, hope to fill in the gaps in our understanding of human evolution by looking at our cousins, the Neanderthals. We need to compare ourselves to our most recent common ancestor, which happens to be extinct, Paabo said at a webcast press conference announcing the project. Among living species, humans share their nearest common ancestor with chimpanzees, which branched off evolutionarily at least 5 million years ago. Neanderthals split off much more recently, somewhere around a half-million years ago. The first Neanderthal fossils were discovered 150 years ago in Germany's Neander Valley. Most...