More Neanderthal News

As I mentioned in a post last week, news accounts have been hinting that more reports on Neanderthal DNA research were due out shortly. Nicholas Wade of the New York Times breaks one of these today, with a progress report on the Neanderthal genome mapping project that I posted on in July.

From the article:

"One million units of Neanderthal DNA have already been analyzed, and a draft version of the entire genome, 3.2 billion units in length, should be ready in two years, said Dr. Svante Paabo, the leader of the research project at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany."

snip

"Dr. Paabo has shared some of his precious sample of Neanderthal DNA with Edward M. Rubin of the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., whose team has identified 62,250 units of Neanderthal DNA by a different method. The two teams report their results in the journals Nature and Science respectively, saying they have independently demonstrated that recovery of the Neanderthal genome is now possible."

snip

"From the data already obtained, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues estimate that the ancestral Neanderthal population was very small, perhaps less than 10,000 individuals. Since the ancestral population of modern humans was much the same size, it seems that all populations of early humans were tiny, expanding only after the ice age ended."

snip

"Dr. Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, published a report earlier this month suggesting that one of the two principal versions of the human gene for microcephalin, which helps determine brain size, came from an archaic population, presumably the Neanderthals.
His analysis suggested that the two versions of the gene had existed separately for a million years. This, Dr. Lahn argued, most probably happened because one version had belonged to Neanderthals during this time.

So far neither team has analyzed enough Neanderthal DNA to test Dr. Lahn’s suggestion. Dr. Paabo said at a news conference that he had obtained "snippets of genes involved in skin and hair color" but that the information was not yet sufficient to draw any conclusions about the Neanderthals’ physical appearance."

Very, very exciting stuff. As I've mentioned before, the go-to place for informed commentary on this is John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, which already has a post up on this and promises more (including an FAQ post) in the coming days. Hawks reports he's had so much traffic today he had to switch to his back-up server.

Hawks quotes an informed commentor in Nature, talking about these new results:

"These papers are perhaps the most significant contributions published in this field since the discovery of Neanderthals 150 years ago."

Exciting times!