Neanderthals were found first in German region Neanderthal in 1856
Neanderthal means Neander valley. There are still lots of unknown things about Neanderthals. Theories have been changing as their bones and DNA are found more and DNA sequencing technology develops high.
The latest theory in 1990s is current humans but Africans under Desert Sahara are descents of mix between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. In May 2010 Svante Paabo from Max Planck Institute decoded Neanderthal genome sequencing completely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03191-9
A finger bone was found in Altai Denisovan cave, Siberia, February 2016, Svante sequenced its DNA from 7000 years ago and confirmed again his theory. As the result won the Nobel Prize in medicine 2022.
He and his team’s research indicated that the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals must have lived around 800,000 years ago. They also proved gene flow from Neanderthal to modern humans.
Both species apparently interbred in the millennia that they lived simultaneously on earth, primarily in Europe and Asia, where the human genomes sequenced contain 1 to 4% Neanderthal genes.
According to recent DNA sequencing, it turned out Denisovans are mix of Neanderthal and homo sapience.
Half Swedish Svante Paabo and Neanderthal gene transfer study
The geneticist Svante Pebo(1955) is called laureate father and the sensitive side of early man. Pebo is credited with altering the history of humanity by completing what was once thought to be impossible extracting ancient DNA and sequencing the Neanderthal genome.
With his discovery of Denisova, a previously undiscovered hominin that refers to modern and extinct humans, as well as our immediate ancestors, he founded the scientific field of paleo genetics and revolutionised our understanding of the past.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/paabo/facts/
He also established that gene transfer between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had occurred around 70,000 years ago.
The discovery that there are significantly fewer genetic differences between two randomly selected modern humans than between Neanderthals and all other modern humans was one of the first of many surprises in his research.
Living humans include at least 50% of the Neanderthal genome and up to 60% to 70%. Therefore Neanderthals are actually still living within us and are not truly extinct.
Svante admits that before his addiction, he had a hobby of sorts. It was vital that he travel to Egypt with his mother Karin Paabo, who was an Estonian chemist and had a brilliant impact in his life.
Karin fled the Soviet invasion of Estonia by moving to Sweden in 1944 and overcame linguistic and financial obstacles to pursue a career in chemistry. She dies in 2013.
Svante’s father had two families and the other was the official one. His father would show up on Saturdays to have coffee or lunch and then he disappear again.
His father was also a Nobel Prize winner in medicine 1982 and died in 2004. But Svante’s career path was not greatly influenced by his father.
Unique complex DNA sequencing techniques by Svante
However he discovered that his romanticised conception of Egyptology was unfounded once he began studying it. He then changed careers to medicine and earned a PhD in molecular biology.
He realised there were methods emerging whereby you could take DNA from an organism, multiply the bacteria and study it. It seemed to him not so far away from being able to this with Egyptian mummies.
In 1984, while doing his doctorate at Upsala University, he caused a sensation when he isolated DNA from the cells of a 2,400 years old Egyptian mummy for the first time.
It turned out it was possible to extract DNA from ancient samples, but they were massively contaminated, including with microorganisms and other sources of DNA.
In 1990 he decided to focus on the mitochondrial DNA, copies of which are present in a significantly higher number inside the cell nucleus compared with DNA.
In 1997 he finally succeeded in isolating the genetic material from 40,000 year old Neanderthal bone that was a part of a Neanderthal skeleton found near Dusseldorf in the 1850s.
In contrast to the DNA from the cell nucleus, the mitochondrial genome is small. It contains only a faction of all the genes that a living being possesses.
He then focused his efforts on creating more complex extraction techniques, which eventually allowed him to extract DNA from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other hominins after years of trial and error.
Svante likens his research to that of an archaeologist and claims that his own curiosity is the main factor driving him. The knowledge he and his team have discovered provides us with a brand new frame of reference for comprehending our evolution, which may have a variety of advantages.
Svante emphasises that it was shocking to learn that those who inherited a certain Neanderthal chromosomal mutation were twice as likely to die from corona virus if infected.
Another unexpected finding has to do with how we perceive pain. He was able to determine that persons with a particular Neanderthal mutation are more likely to feel pain and to age more quickly using information from the UK’s biobank.
It is the largest biomedical database in the world that holds the genetic information of about 500,000 of the nation’s population. In UK there are lots of Southern Asia population as well as African British.
Other extensive research initiatives cover a wide range of topics, including HIV susceptibility and preterm births and miscarriages. Here, it has been demonstrated that having a Neanderthal variation can prevent miscarriage.
Svante is 67 years old and says today in the public domain there are three high quality Neanderthal genomes, and he can tell you that there are more on the way adding that he has put off retiring for the time being.
Source: nature
