Most of you probably know this, but the race is on to sequence the Neandertal genome. Nick Wade has a decent story on it. Important point:
The chimp and human genomes differ at just 1 percent of the sites on their DNA. At this 1 percent, Neanderthals resemble humans at 96 percent of the sites [the first 3 million base pairs], to judge from the preliminary work, and chimps at 4 percent.
No surprise, the putative last common ancestor between chimps and humans is 6 million years BP, Neandertals and modern humans is 500,000 years BP, and order of magnitude difference. But these "last common ancestor" numbers derived from coalescence of uniparental lineages (e.g., mtDNA) should be taken with a grain of salt as sister speies often interbreed, see the work on baboon hybrid zones. Here's a money shot for GNXP readers:
A longstanding dispute among archaeologists is whether the ...
