ShareThisAn editorial / By Dale McFeatters
Monday, November 20, 2006
The Neanderthals _ cave men, if you will _ are one of science's great mysteries.
What was their relation to mankind's ancestors when they both inhabited Europe? Did they intermarry? And why did they die out about 30,000 years ago, leaving us as the preeminent hominid?
Research teams in Germany and the United States have got at least a start on answering those questions by painstakingly recovering DNA from a Neanderthal bone fragment that for years lay nearly forgotten in a museum. They believe eventually they will be able to reconstruct the entire Neanderthal genome.
Somewhere, very roughly, around 700,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals had a common ancestor but the species divided around 500,000 years ago. What little remains and artifacts of the Neanderthals survive tend to show that they were stocky, muscular and, to survive the ice ages, certainly tough.
What was stunning about the scientists' findings is that human DNA is 99.5 percent identical to Neanderthal DNA, differing by only about 3 million base pairs of genes out of a genetic code of 3 billion base pairs.
Perhaps that half a percent is why we're studying Neanderthal DNA and not vice versa.
Isn't Kevin Federline enough
Isn't Kevin Federline enough proof