CHANGING THEORIES
But less than two decades later, scientific thinking about Neanderthals would undergo yet another drastic transition. In 1987, biochemists Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson published a paper in the scientific journal Nature, in which they used analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 147 people from around the world to show that the first anatomically modern humans had developed in Africa 200,000 years ago, apparently separately from the Neanderthals of Europe and the Middle East. The “out of Africa” theory not only rejected the idea that Neanderthals were among the ancestors of modern humans, but also lent credence to the notion that
the spread of modern humans out of Africa to other continents had helped drive Neanderthals into extinction.
Once again, not everyone agreed. In 1998, the discovery in Portugal of the skeletal remains of a four-year-old boy with both Neanderthal and modern human features provided a boost to those who argue that Neanderthals are among the ancestors of today’s humanity. There seemed to be no clear way to resolve the controversy.
Then, in 2006, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany began working with a Connecticut company, 454 Life Sciences, on a project to map the Neanderthal genome, using DNA fragments extracted from Neanderthal remains. While that work is still in progress, one early finding from analysis of Neanderthal DNA suggests that it may well lead to yet another significant shift in our perception of Neanderthals. Researchers have discovered that Neanderthals had exactly the same version of the FoxP2 gene, which is associated with the use of language, as modern humans — a similarity that would be difficult to explain if the two groups evolved separately. The discovery also raises the possibility that modern humans acquired the language gene by interbreeding with Neanderthals. If that proves to be true, it would mean that Neanderthals not only were our long-ago relatives, but contributed an important part of what it means to be human.
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