GOD ( Archived) (101)

Theres a pretty good article in this weeks New Scientist;

First draft of Neanderthal genome is unveiled

15:08 12 February 2009 by Ewen Callaway

The first draft of the genome of a 38,000 year-old Neanderthal is complete, scientists announced today.

Early glimpses of the genome, which was sequenced by Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues, have already cast new light on the ancient human species that went extinct more than 25,000 years ago.

"This will be the first time the entire genome of an extinct organism has been sequenced," Pääbo told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

Now study of the more complete genome will allow scientists to examine Neanderthals' relationship with modern humans as never before.

A preliminary analysis of the sequence suggests that Neanderthals contributed few, if any, genes to humans via inbreeding. "There's no positive evidence that it occurred at all," Pääbo says.

'Terrific' news
Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, UK, remembers hearing Pääbo announce, in the late 1990s, that his team had sequenced a few hundred letters of Neanderthal DNA.

"You couldn't have imagined 10 years later we'd be talking about the whole genome," Stringer says.

"I think it's just terrific. It's a bit like suddenly getting a Hubble telescope," says Edward Rubin, a genomicist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California. "We can study Neanderthals from a whole new vantage point."

However, Rubin notes that the sequence is a rough draft that will need much filling in. "To feel really confident in conclusions you make from this data, it will come from going deeper or looking at other Neanderthals," he says.

In the announcement, Pääbo said 3 billion letters of DNA comprising 60% of a male Neanderthal's genome, as well as several million more letters from three other individuals, have now been sequenced.

Thats pretty much how I see it too T but most folk look at me a bit askance when I suggest it simply always has been -