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The next time someone calls you a Neanderthal because of your old fashioned ways, tell him that even so, you’re still 99.5% very much like him.  In fact, you may even want to thank him as Neanderthals most likely had bigger brains than humans.

Neanderthals were a species of the Homo genus that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appear in Europe as early as 350,000 years ago.  By 130,000 years ago, full blown Neanderthal characteristics had appeared and by 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals disappeared from Asia, although they did not reach extinction in Europe until 33,000 to 24,000 years ago, perhaps 15,000 years after Homo sapiens had migrated into Europe.  Furthermore, Humans and Neanderthals began diverging from a common ancestor about 700,000 years ago, and the two groups split permanently some 300,000 years later, according to two of the most detailed analyses of Neanderthal DNA to date.

Evidence suggest that Neanderthals, though most likely living in caves, don’t have cave-men-like attitude.  They cared for their sick, they buried their dead, they even used tools.  In fact, humans and Neanderthals may have shared the same hunting grounds thousands of years ago.  Some even suggest that both species interbred but no evidence has been found to prove this claim thus far.

To achieve the 99.5% similarity proposal, using different techniques, two teams of scientists separately sequenced large chunks of DNA extracted from the femur of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen found in a cave 26 years ago in Croatia. One team sequenced more than one million base pairs and the other 65,000 pairs of the genome.

The achievements could help shed light on the evolution of our own species, and it paves the way for building a complete library of the Neanderthal genome, the scientists say.

Resources:

• Neanderthal: 99.5 Percent Human
• Wikipedia: Neanderthal

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