First Draft of Neandertal Genome Unveiled at 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting

Svante Paabo holds a Neandertal skull

Photo © Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

CHICAGO—A rough draft of the Neandertal genome, announced Thursday in a joint press conference in Leipzig, Germany, and the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting, confirms that modern humans and Neandertals shared a speech-related gene, and may soon reveal more about our kinship with our closest evolutionary cousins.

Evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues said their first draft contains nearly 63% of the Neandertal genome. Looking at individual genes, the team hopes to "home in on the differences that might have made a difference to our ancestors" as Neandertals and modern humans diverged genetically about 800,000 years ago, said Pääbo.

Neandertals were the closest relatives of currently living humans. They lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago. For more than a hundred years, paleontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover their evolutionary relationship to modern humans, who emerged roughly 400,000 years ago.

"Getting the genome of our closest living relative is a critical research goal because it will allow us to make key genomic comparisons," said Brooks Hanson, deputy managing editor for the physical sciences at the journal Science, published by AAAS. "Being able to look at some of the recent evolution of humans by comparing Neandertal DNA with modern humans as well as other species will shed light on both our own origins and the process of evolution."

Pääbo, a pioneer in the field of ancient DNA research, made the first contribution to the understanding of our genetic relationship to Neandertals when he sequenced Neandertal mitochondrial DNA in 1997.

Pääbo will reveal more of the Neandertal genome in a plenary address at the Annual Meeting on Sunday 15 February. His talk will discuss the promise of paleogenomic research, the genes that have been compared between Neandertals and modern humans so far, and the evidence for inbreeding between the two types of humans.

Read analysis of the genome announcement at Science News, the UK's Telegraph, and USA Today.

Becky Ham

13 February 2009