Thursday, July 17, 2008

New Study looks at CroMag + Neander for Modern HomoSap

Ever in search of the kink, IO9 spots an article in Plos One that deals with a new Italian study which revisits the possibility that in some part modern homo-sapiens are the result of blended genetic material from Neanderthal and Cro-magnon or more accurately the early ancestors of Homo-sapiens.

A group of Italian researchers published a new study comparing the DNA from early human bones from about 28,000 years ago with DNA Neanderthal bones.

What is very interesting about the study and ultimately the findings centers on the early HS bones. These bones were discovered very recently and as such are not as likely as earlier samples to be contaminated by genetic material from modern humans handling them.

The researchers sequenced DNA from these bones, testing to see if there was significant overlap with Neanderthal DNA, which would indicate that homo
sapiens' DNA had been changed by interbreeding with Neanderthals. But tests of the fossilized DNA revealed no matches. The early HS material looks essentially identical to modern humans while looking significantly different from Neanderthal DNA.


Plos One via IO9

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