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Old August 6th, 2013 #4
Jean West
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Posts: 476
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One of the things that Marie mentions on her web site is that she doesn't use credentialed resources. This is something that I relate to strongly; discerning the biases of the authors of studies is a problem. There's a lot of misinformation about Neanderthals, or maybe I should say confusion; scientists just haven't known what to make of them; were they humans or were they not? The latest information comes from cave findings. Here's a brief description of a particular bone finding.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

A high-quality Neandertal genome sequence

The genome sequence was generated from a toe bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia in 2010. The bone is described in Mednikova (Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 2011. 39: 129-138).

DNA sequences were generated on the Illumina HiSeq platform and constitute an average 50-fold coverage of the genome. 99.9% of the 1.7GB of uniquely mappable DNA sequences in the human genome are covered at least ten times.

Contamination with modern human DNA, estimated from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences, is around 1%.

The figure shows a tree relating this genome to the genomes of Neandertals from Croatia, from Germany and from the Caucasus as well as the Denisovan genome recovered from a finger bone excavated at Deniosva Cave. It shows that this individual is closely related to these other Neandertals. Thus, both Neandertals and Denisovans have inhabited this cave in southern Siberia, presumably at different times.
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