Experimental Blog # 209

Quotations and notes from "Neanderthal Man" - In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo

"Since the nucleus has two copies of the genome - it contains about 6.4 billion nucleotide pairs. By comparison, the mitochondrial DNA is tiny, with a little over 16, 500 nucleotide pairs ..."
"We compared the Neanderthal mtDNA with that of 510 Europeans < > 478 Africans < > 494 Asians. The average number of differences from the mtDNAs of these people was also twenty-eight."
" ... the Neanderthal mtDNA did not trace back to this Mitochondrial Eve but went further back before it shared an ancestor with the mtDNAs of humans alive today."
".. the ancestor that the Neanderthal mtDNA shared with human mtDNAs lived about 500,000 years ago .."

The author describes at great length the constantly changing and improving methods and amazing machines that were used in these genetic researches; so that tasks that once required weeks or even months to accomplish could be done in one day or over night.

" .. some paleontologists claimed that they saw Neanderthal traits in the skeletons of early modern people in Europe."
"And eventually the Neanderthal DNA would spread throughout the population so everyone would have some proportion of it. < > it would not become further diluted but remain indefinitely in the population. Also, if mixing did happen, it likely didn't occur only once."
"We had 1.2 million nucleotides of Neanderthal DNA determined from Vindija < > about 400,000 < > from Neander Valley < > 300,000 < > from El Sidron ..."
"Nevertheless, the ancestors of people today and the ancestors of Neanderthals probably went their separate ways at least 300,000 years ago."
"Whenever an African and a non-African were compared, the Neanderthal matched the non-African at around 2 percent more SNPs than did the African. There did indeed seem to be a small but clearly discernible genetic contribution from Neanderthals to people outside Africa, no matter where they lived."
" ... about 2 percent of the DNA of people even in China comes from Neanderthals."
" ...a different analysis < > asked how far Europeans and Asians are toward being 100 percent Neanderthals. The answer varied between 1.3 and 2.7 percent."

"The dirty little secret of genomics is that we still know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of a living and breathing individual. < > I realized that we would not be able to directly identify the genetic underpinnings of the differences between Neanderthals and modern humans."