|
|
Article: Homo sapiens, Neanderthal DNA appears unmixed.
- Article from:
- The Dallas Morning News (Dallas, TX)
- Article date:
- May 19, 2003
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 The Dallas Morning News. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
A new study suggests that Neanderthals did not contribute to the gene pool of modern humans, as some scientists have argued.
Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived side by side in Europe and the Near East for thousands of years. Most paleoanthropologists consider them separate species, but some contend that there may have been some interbreeding.
New work, published online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared 24,000-year-old DNA from H. sapiens with ancient Neanderthal DNA. The gene sequences were strikingly different, suggesting that interbreeding never took place, wrote a team led by Giorgio Bertorelle of the ...