My mother was not a Neanderthal
Another finding of the Genographic Project was that they saw no evidence that Neanderthals were our "recent" ancestors. This is important because we don't know what happened to these guys.
For hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals ruled Europe. Then our ancestors moved in and pretty quickly, the Neanderthals were gone.
Some scientists think we killed them off. Some think we were just better and so they died out. And some others think that they had babies together and we all have a little Neanderthal in us.
To figure out which idea is correct, scientists have compared our mtDNA to that of the Neanderthal's. Why did they want to look at mtDNA? Because they could.
There is a whole lot of it in a cell making it relatively easy to get. Instead of just two copies per cell like our chromosomes, our cells have thousands of copies of mtDNA.
Because there is so much of this DNA, we are able to get some from unlikely sources. Like hair or mammoths. Or Neanderthals.
The Genographic Project provides a great resource for answering the question of whether there was any monkey business between humans and Neanderthals. The scientists found no evidence of any.
As you can imagine, getting DNA from a 30,000 or 40,000 year old fossil is not a simple thing. But scientists have managed in six cases to get a chunk of 300 bases of mtDNA from Neanderthals that looks very good.
Studying these six samples showed five DNA differences that Neanderthals had that we do not. Previously scientists looked at all of the human mtDNA so far collected and did not find any that had all 5 changes. But the number of human samples was relatively small.
The folks at the Genographic Project could look at many more samples. And none of the 78,500 or so samples had more than one of these DNA differences. This suggests that there isn't any Neanderthal DNA in modern human mtDNA.
They also just looked at the whole 300 bases and compared them to the human samples. None of the human samples was as different as the Neanderthal ones. So they found no evidence that our "recent" ancestors were Neanderthals.
This is more evidence that Neanderthals simply died out and that we did not interbreed. Recently scientists have begun to look at more than mtDNA. This will either confirm these findings or tell us that we may have Neanderthals in our family tree. We'll just have to wait and see.
Ancestry, Neanderthals and Mitochondrial DNA | Understanding Genetics
