Neanderthals, the extinct cousins of Homo sapiens who once populated much of Europe and western Asia, were in the news again last week, as the audacious project to sequence DNA from a 38,000-year-old fossil bone showed its first results. One team, headed by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, reported in the journal Nature that it had succeeded in sequencing the first million units of Neanderthal DNA, out of a total of about 3 bil-lion.
展开▼
