The Year in Science: Neanderthal DNA Found

A small stretch of dna from a Neanderthal bone was described this past year, and it doesn’t look like ours. The bone was the right humerus, or upper-arm bone, of the Neander Valley skeleton itself, discovered near Düsseldorf in 1856; the dna was from the control region of mitochondrial dna. The control region codes for nothing, and so natural selection ignores it; and sex does too, because unlike the dna that makes us visibly who we are, the stuff in the cell nucleus, mitochondrial dna is passed intact from mother—and only from mother—to child. In theory, the control region comes to each one of us out of the deep past, like a taste for chicken soup, via an endless bucket brigade of mothers, altered only by random mutations. If some of us had a Neanderthal in that maternal line, her imprint ought to be discernible. Svante Pääbo of the University of Munich and his colleagues looked at the dna from their single Neanderthal, and they looked at dna from more than 1,600 modern Europeans, Africans, Asians, native Americans and Australians, and Oceanians. They saw no evidence of a relation.