Just a year ago, when Svante Pääbo, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, announced he was going to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the project seemed unlikely to succeed. Despite sifting aggressively through Neanderthal fossils, scientists had managed to unearth only bits of mitochondrial DNA, secondary genetic blueprints that describe the energy-producing units of cells but not the entire organism. Suddenly, things are looking up: Pääbo recently declared he has found nuclear DNA (the global kind) in a 45,000-year-old Croatian Neanderthal museum specimen and has sequenced a million base pairs of it.
Pääbo now estimates that he will have a complete draft of the Neanderthal genome within two years, and the doubters are turning quiet. His studies of this nuclear DNA are already yielding a better understanding of our big-boned cousins. For example, based on his reconstructed genetic sequence, Pääbo calculates that modern humans last shared a common ...
