Neanderthal Man

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo, Basic Books, 2014.

Laboratory Analysis of Ancient DNA

This book describes how the author, a Swedish molecular biologist, analyzed Neanderthal DNA in his laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. He and his group have analyzed the DNA of some Neanderthal remains.

Avoiding Sample Contamination

His main achievement has been the prevention of contamination of his Neanderthal DNA samples by contemporary human DNA. Ancient DNA is also contaminated by microorganisms that lived in the bones after the animal or ancient human died.

Neanderthals

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens diverged in Africa about eight hundred thousand years ago. Most of the DNA sequences of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are the same, because they were both inherited from their common ancestor. However, they also have some other DNA sequences in common, because Homo sapiens and Neanderthals mated 30-40 thousand years ago in the Levant and Europe. Sophisticated data analysis techniques can determine whether shared genes come from a common ancestor, or from interbreeding. These issues are similar to the linguists study of loan words.,

Author's Trainees

Junior scientists who worked with him:

• Adrian Briggs

• Richard E. Green

• Alex Greenwood

• Oliva Handt

• Michael Hofreiter

• Matthias Höss

• Johannes Krause

• Matthias Krings

• Tomislav Maričić

• Hendrik Poinar

• Anne Stone

• Hans Zischler