Neanderthal genome project

It was initiated by 454 Life Sciences, a biotechnology company based in Branford, Connecticut in the United States and is coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

DNA was extracted from a toe fragment from a female Neanderthal researchers have dubbed the "Altai Neandertal".

[7] In February 2009, the Max Planck Institute's team led by Svante Pääbo announced that they had completed the first draft of the Neanderthal genome.

[9] On the question of potentially cloning a Neanderthal, Pääbo commented, "Starting from the DNA extracted from a fossil, it is and will remain impossible.

[19] In 2015, Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University reported that a skull found in a cave in northern Israel, is "probably a woman, who lived and died in the region about 55,000 years ago, placing modern humans there and then for the first time ever", pointing to a potential time and location when modern humans first interbred with Neanderthals.

[23] The results were received with some scepticism, mainly surrounding the issue of a possible admixture of Neanderthals into the modern human genome.

[25] Noonan's team, led by Edward Rubin, used a different technique, one in which the Neanderthal DNA is inserted into bacteria, which make multiple copies of a single fragment.

One group suggested there was a hint of mixing between human and Neanderthal genomes, while the other found none, but both teams recognized that the data set was not large enough to give a definitive answer.

The research team estimates the most recent common ancestor of their H. neanderthalensis samples and their H. sapiens reference sequence lived 706,000 years ago (divergence time), estimating the separation of the human and Neanderthal ancestral populations to 370,000 years ago (split time).Our analyses suggest that on average the Neanderthal genomic sequence we obtained and the reference human genome sequence share a most recent common ancestor ~706,000 years ago, and that the human and Neanderthal ancestral populations split ~370,000 years ago, before the emergence of anatomically modern humans.Based on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, the split of the Neanderthal and H. sapiens lineages is estimated to date to between 760,000 and 550,000 years ago (95% CI).