WHAT are the genetic changes that set us apart from our Neanderthal cousins?
Although they are long extinct, we may soon know the answers. More than 1 million base pairs of fossil Neanderthal DNA have now been sequenced, the most of any extinct organism, thanks to a new high-throughput sequencing technique that is well suited to handling old, degraded DNA.
“It’s a technological leap forward,” says Richard Green, who with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has sequenced DNA from a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature05336).
The sequence suggests that humans…
