Science lol

While I eventually will get around to finishing the next in my series on birds and genomes, I just wanted to comment on something retrospectively funny. Right now, I'm rereading Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Amazon/Chapters) by Sean Carroll, and one of the comments about hominin evolution was that humans (homo sapiens sapiens) and neanderthals (homo neanderthalensis or, presciently, homo sapiens neanderthalensis) did not mate together.¹ The actual study itself was sequencing the complete mitochondrial genome, which upon analysis demonstrated that it was grouped outside of known human mitochondrial DNA and thus suggesting that neanderthals made no genetic contribution to our lineage. However, I remember reading somwhere (John Hawk's blog I think) that just because neanderthal mitochondrial DNA didn't survive to modern day, it wasn't conclusive evidence that neanderthals did not contribute to our somatic genome. And, ironically enough, the same group that lead the mitochondrial project also sequenced the neanderthal genome a couple years later and found that neanderthals did contribute to our genome afterall!^2,3 Et voila, science in practice!

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1. Green RE et al. 2008. A Complete Neandertal Mitochondrial Genome Sequence Determined by High-Throughput Sequencing. Cell. 134(3):416-426.

2. Green RE et al. 2010. A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome. Science. 328:710-722.

3. Only applies to H. sapiens sapiens whose ancestors left Africa.