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Meet The Relatives: Neanderthals

By Elizabeth C.

A LITTLE BIT OF CAVEMAN LURKS IN MOST OF US, SAY SCIENTISTS who've mapped out the genomes of Neanderthals who lived more than 38,000 years ago in Croatia.

The finding counters previous studies and lends evidence that modern homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals as recently as 50,000 years ago, before modern humans spread into East Asia.

Paleogeneticists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany sequenced the Neanderthal genome using more than 4 billion nucleotides recovered from the bones of three females.

The gene sequence was then compared to five modern humans from different regions of the world.

Researchers found that, with the exception of Africans, modern humans shared one to four percent of genes with Neanderthals, from whom humans diverged between 270,000 and 440,000 years ago, according to this study's authors.

All told, Neanderthals and humans share a relatively paltry 100 genes. How these genes specifically affect modern man will no doubt be thes subject of future research. And the new finding, based purely on statistical comparison, is problematic for some scientists.

“They are basically saying, ‘Here are our data, you have to accept it," Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford, told the New York Times. "But the little part I can judge seems to me to be problematic, so I have to worry about the rest."

Neanderthals were stronger, slightly shorter, and had less protruding chins than modern man, according to scientists. They used soft tools, fire, practiced cannibalism, and ate meat almost exclusively, according to Wikipedia.

One study suggests that they were red-heads with pale skin. Based on fossil and genetic discoveries, they are believed to have had language capabilities, which scientist Steven Mithen proposes was more "musical" than modern man's.