Africans are different to Europeans, Asians, Americans
"Scientific Sensation"
Neanderthals but our ancestor
'An absolute scientific sensation: The Neanderthal is still an ancestor of modern man. This is the conclusion researchers that large parts of the Neanderthal genome have been deciphered and analyzed.
Eye to eye with the ancestor nit: The director of the LVR-LandesMuseum in Bonn, Gabriele Uelsberg and a replica of a Neanderthal.
(Photo: dpa)
The Neanderthal man is but an ancestor of modern man. This is the result of an international research group that large parts of the Neanderthal genome deciphered, and has already analyzed. "This is an absolute scientific sensation," said the one involved in the study Bonner Neanderthal expert Ralf W. Schmitz. The research team presents its work on the first draft of the Neanderthal genome in the U.S. journal "Science before" and compares them with parts of the genome of modern man.
The nuclear DNA from the bones of Neanderthals was sequenced according to Schmitz six, led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Previous analysis, which were based solely on the genome of the cell power plants (mitochondria), had spoken against a closer kinship of modern humans 30,000 years ago with the extinct Neanderthals.
Worldwide polulärster caveman
The latest results of the Leipzig Neanderthal genome project shows that probably the world's most popular prehistoric man between one and four percent of the genes of modern populations in Europe and Asia has helped to write the researchers. "Now it is clear that the Neanderthals are still to be counted among our ancestors," said Schmitz, who works at the University of Bonn and the LVR-land Museum of that city.
What makes the Neanderthal genes detected even in today's Chinese and people of Papua New Guinea, although there has never lived a Neanderthal, was another surprise, "said the expert. The immigrant anatomically modern humans from Africa had, therefore, in the Middle East blended with the Neanderthals, where both types of people would archaeologically detectable until about 50,000 years ago lived for 30,000 years together. From here the newcomer, the Neanderthal genetic heritage to its further migration to Europe and Asia have taken.
The replica of a Neanderthal in the older Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann.
(Photo: dpa)
Genetic traces of the second meeting with surviving Neanderthals in Europe had so far, however, can not be verified and possibly obscured by later immigrant people of the Neolithic Age have been. However: "Those of us who live outside of Africa, a little bit of Neanderthals bear down," says Svante Pääbo, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.
Until now, scientists were largely assumed that had separated during evolution before today's man and Neanderthals about 500,000 years ago. This would be detectable by some 300 finds primitive man who inhabited Europe about 300,000 years, was only a distant relative of modern humans.
"Very special challenges"
to analyze the genome of a long-extinct species, scientists presented the "special challenges" to describe the Leipzig experts. The DNA is in course of time disintegrate into tiny fragments and sometimes chemically modified. It adds the problem of pollution. "More than 95 percent of the DNA in a sample derived from bacteria and microorganisms that colonized the Neanderthals after his death," says Pääbo. Including human DNA, which arrives at the excavation or in the laboratory in the sample distorts the results.
After the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, the Leipzig scientists want to find out in the coming years by DNA analysis further details about the nature of the Neanderthals, such as metabolism, brain development, or language ability. On LVR-Landesmuseum in Bonn, where the skeleton discovered in 1856 the patron saint of all Neanderthals is kept, the archaeologist and Ralf W. Schmitz Urgeschichtler coordinate the work of 19 university institutions to the Neanderthals.
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