Humans are cavemen

Women have always said it. Now it is confirmed, only that we are all Neanderthals, including women. After four years of work, the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, though not quite completely, but sufficient for scientists to compare it with those of homo sapiens, us.

Apparently, according to these early studies, human and Neanderthal genome is almost identical at the protein level, our building blocks, and most people can trace some of their DNA to Neanderthals.

“The Neanderthals are not totally extinct. In some of us they live on a little bit,” says Svante Paabo, evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute. Cool. And that includes women, too.

A working sequence was assembled from the DNA in the bones of three 38,000-year-old Neanderthal women, found in Croatia’s Vindija Cave. The sequence now covers about 60 per cent of the entire genome. Although incomplete, researchers were able to compare the Neanderthal genome to the human at 14,000 protein-coding gene segments that are different between humans and chimpanzees. Researchers have linked these proteins to changes in humans’ cognitive development, physiology and metabolism.

Researchers also compared the Neanderthal genome to genomes of five people from China, France, Papua New Guinea, southern Africa and western Africa. Among non-Africans, between one and four per cent of all DNA came from Neanderthals. Many studies have suggested a Neanderthal-human inbreeding.

Paabo  gave comfort to people of African descent disappointed that they lack Neanderthal ancestry by saying that they probably had contributions from other archaic humans.

Wired.com