Book: Neanderthal Man

Svante Paabo's account of the project to sequence the Neaderthal genome, and all the scientific challenges of resurrecting 30,000 year old DNA. Contrary to Jurassic Park, DNA begins to decompose as soon as the cellular repair mechanisms stop working, and it only gets worse with moisture or bacterial growth or human handling.

Nevertheless after immense effort and some very clever shortcuts, he was basically able to do it.

But the book is about more than that.

Unusual for a non-fiction science book, Paabo delves into the politics of cutting edge science -- labs competing for grants, senior researchers refusing to share interim results for fear of being scooped, star researchers being poached by other labs, secretive development of innovative lab techniques, sniping among scientists with differing interpretations of shared data.

And Paabo goes a step farther. He is bisexual, and has been involved in some tricky love triangles among his colleagues. His matter-of-fact descriptions of getting his research assistant's wife pregnant, three years before they divorced, is woven into a narrative about reactants and gene splicing. It's very odd.

Paabo comes across as not a particularly likable man, but his own self-image admits this possibility and embraces his own human failings.

It's an interesting combination of memoir and scientific detective story.

And new evidence suggests Denisovans interbred with H. Sapiens almost as much as Neanderthals.

My DNA shows to be 1.5% Neanderthal and 0.7% Denisovan.

Neanderthals never died out; they blended in.

I'm tempted to place this in "Crap Science in the Era of Trump," taking 15 year old research and parading it as "new," but this Neanderthal thread needs new posts more than the crap science thread.

Origins of H. neanderthalis are still not definitively established, but the oldest confirmed skeleton is 430,000 years old. The last ones died out 40,000 years ago. No skeletons have been found outside Europe.

H. Sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago and migrated out of Africa in two waves, the first 130,000 to 100,000 years ago, and the second 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. So the two species overlapped for as much as 90,000 years (130,000 to 40,000 years ago) to as little as 10,000 years (50,000 to 40,000 years ago). Since there is no mitochondrial DNA to be recovered, it's unknown if the interbreeding was male Neanderthal with Sapiens female, or vice versa, or both.

All humans alive today descended from the second out-of-Africa wave. Therefore it's impossible to test if any of the first wave(s) interbred. This is because at about 70,000 years ago there was some catastrophe (possibly Toba the supervolcano) that killed all modern humans alive, except for somewhere between 100,000 and 40 (yes 40) of us. Our genetics show we're all descended from a very small set of DNA. So the survivors may have had no choice but to pair up with the more hardy Neanderthals.

Coincidentally, the most recent episode of Radiolab is about recent discoveries about Neanderthals, including evidence that many of them survived major traumatic injuries. Evidence of systemic healthcare for the infirm, evidence we DON'T have for H. Sapiens of the same era. Evidence they chewed beech leaves which contain salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin.

They may have given us medicine, during the darks times when we were trying to survive the volcano's worldwide effects.