GENEALOGY-DNA-L Archives

From: "ljcrain" <>
Subject: [DNA] Neanderthal Man
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 00:18:56 -0500

Neanderthal Man
Svante Paabo has probed the DNA of Egyptian mummies and extinct animals. Now he hopes to learn more about what makes us tick by decoding the DNA of our evolutionary cousins.

By Steve Olson


As a boy in Sweden, Svante Paabo read everything he could about ancient civilizations. After powerful North Sea storms uprooted trees, he begged his parents to take him to archaeological sites to look for potsherds and other artifacts. When he was 13, his mother, a food chemist in Stockholm, yielded to her son's most frequent request: to visit Egypt. "It was absolutely fascinating," he recalls. "We went to the pyramids, to Karnak and the Valleyof the Kings. The soil was full of artifacts."
Paabo, 51, is still looking for artifacts, but in a very different place. He's a leader of the worldwide quest to explore the past by analyzing human DNA. He has helped show that human groups—southern Africans, Western Europeans, Native Americans—are closely related, despite superficial distinctions. He has been uncovering key genetic changes that helped transform our shambling, hirsute ancestors into the brainy bipeds we are today. This past summer, Paabo announced that he and his co-workers were going to take the next—and biggest—step, in their effort to resurrect the genome of the Neanderthal, our distant evolutionary cousin, who went extinct 30,000 years ago. The first scientist to analyze segments of DNA from Neanderthal bones, Paabo now wants to re-create the entire DNA sequence of a Neanderthal and compare it with our own, looking for the reasons that one evolutionary experiment failed and the other succeeded. "He really is a visionary," says Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of Washington.

cont. here:

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/october/neanderthal.php

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• [DNA] Neanderthal Man by "ljcrain" <>