Evolution Diary

Newsweek

Nov. 27, 2006 issue - Neanderthals, the extinct cousins of Homo sapiens who once populated much of Europe and western Asia, were in the news again last week, as the audacious project to sequence DNA from a 38,000-year-old fossil bone showed its first results. One team, headed by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, reported in the journal Nature that it had succeeded in sequencing the first million units of Neanderthal DNA, out of a total of about 3 billion.

A parallel effort, led by Edward Rubin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and published in Science, had found about 65,000 units, using a technology that targets DNA of particular interest.

Eventually the project could help answer questions such as whether Neanderthals could speak, but the papers last week mostly confirmed what anthropologists already suspected: that the human and Neanderthal lines of descent began to separate about 700,000 years ago and diverged permanently about 330,000 years later. Rubin found no evidence that Neanderthals, who inhabited the same parts of the world as humans for thousands of years, ever bred with them.

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