Last year DISCOVER asked the question, "Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?" Now, Zach Zorich at Archaeology magazine is asking another big question about our hominid siblings: Should we bring them back? Thanks to a slew of recent advances, the possibility is getting closer. 80beats reported a year ago that researchers had published the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. However, that's likely to contain many errors because it's so difficult to reconstruct ancient DNA.
Within hours of death, cells begin to break down in a process called apoptosis. The dying cells release enzymes that chop up DNA into tiny pieces. In a human cell, this means that the entire three-billion-base-pair genome is reduced to fragments about 50 base-pairs long [Archaeology]
. Even if scientists succeed in figuring out the entire Neanderthal genome, they'd be faced with another problem before they could even consider the possibility ...
