Sequencing and analysis of Neanderthal genomic DNA
Open accessAbstract
Our knowledge of Neanderthals is based on a limited number of remains and artifacts from which we must make inferences about their biology, behavior, and relationship to ourselves. Here, we describe the characterization of these extinct hominids from a new perspective, based on the development of a Neanderthal metagenomic library and its high-throughput sequencing and analysis. Several lines of evidence indicate that the 65,250 base pairs of hominid sequence so far identified in the library are of Neanderthal origin, the strongest being the ascertainment of sequence identities between Neanderthal and chimpanzee at sites where the human genomic sequence is different. These results enabled us to calculate the human-Neanderthal divergence time based on multiple randomly distributed autosomal loci. Our analyses suggest that on average the Neanderthal genomic sequence we obtained and the reference human genome sequence share a most recent common ancestor approximately 706,000 years ago, and that the human and Neanderthal ancestral populations split approximately 370,000 years ago, before the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Our finding that the Neanderthal and human genomes are at least 99.5% identical led us to develop and successfully implement a targeted method for recovering specific ancient DNA sequences from metagenomic libraries. This initial analysis of the Neanderthal genome advances our understanding of the evolutionary relationship of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis and signifies the dawn of Neanderthal genomics.
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Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans share an identical FOXP2 protein.
“Perhaps surprisingly, Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans share an identical FOXP2 protein (Meyer et al., 2012; Noonan et al., 2006).”
From Genetic Changes Shaping the Human Brain (2015) · cites this paper as Noonan et al., 2006
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“These genome sequences span a range from less than 1 million years (between Neandertal and human) [9,10] up to 87 million years of divergence (between mouse and human) [35].”
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- Authors
- Noonan, J. P., Coop, G., Kudaravalli, S., Smith, D., Krause, J., Alessi, J., Chen, F., Platt, D., Pääbo, S., Pritchard, J. K., & Rubin, E. M.
- Affiliations
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, 2800 Mitchell Drive, Walnut Creek, CA 94598, USA.
- Corresponding author
- Rubin, Edward M.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2006-11-17
- Volume
- 314
- Issue
- 5802
- Pages
- 1113-1118
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- PMC
- PMC2583069
- OpenAlex
- W2005743153
- Cited by
- 629
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 31 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 19 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 40 · 2012: 25
- FWCI
- 336.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
- University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) (submittedVersion)
- Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (submittedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (HL-066681, U01HL066681)
- National Human Genome Research Institute (R01 HG002772-1, R01HG002772)
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (F32GM074367, 1-F32-GM074367)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Forensic and Genetic Research
- Keywords
- Neanderthal genome, ancient DNA sequencing, Neanderthals, human
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Bone and Bones, Cell Nucleus, Pan troglodytes, DNA, DNA, Mitochondrial, Biological Evolution, Fossils, Gene Pool, Humans, Male, Molecular Sequence Data, Time, Hominidae, Genomic Library, Genome, Human, Polymerase Chain Reaction, Sequence Alignment, Genome, Sequence Analysis, DNA, History, Ancient
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