Blogs / 80beats

For the first time, scientists have sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of a Neanderthal. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, analyzed the genetic material from a 38,000-year-old leg bone found in Croatia and published their findings today in Cell.

The mitochondria are only passed down the female line, so can be used to trace the species back to an ancestral “Eve”, the mother of all Neanderthals. The team analysed the DNA of 13 genes from the Neanderthal mitochondria and found they were distinctly different to modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans. The genetic material shows that a Neanderthal “Eve” lived around 660,000 years ago, when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans [Guardian].

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A clump of hair that lay frozen in the Greenland tundra for 4,000 years has yielded DNA from the earliest Arctic residents, and offers clues to their origins.

Researchers have long wondered who those rugged settlers were, and where they came from. Were they part of a massive migration that swept through all of North America, or were they a separate tribe that eventually gave rise to Greenland’s present-day Eskimos?

Until now, no ancient human remains had been found in that harsh climate to allow researchers to study the genetics of those “Paleo-Eskimos.” But the new discovery sheds some light on the people, and suggests that neither of the earlier theories is correct; in fact, they were a distinct tribe that journeyed all the way from Siberia to Greenland, but didn’t stick around to populate the frozen north.

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