WHAT are the genetic changes that set us apart from our Neanderthal cousins?
Although they are long extinct, we may soon know the answers. More than 1 million base pairs of fossil Neanderthal DNA have now been sequenced, the most of any extinct organism, thanks to a new high-throughput sequencing technique that is well suited to handling old, degraded DNA.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a technological leap forward,鈥� says Richard Green, who with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has sequenced DNA from a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature05336).
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The sequence suggests that humans and Neanderthals began to diverge about 516,000 years ago, and that our common ancestor lived in a small population comprising around 3000 individuals.
