cient DNA has been retrieved and analyzed from Egyptian mummies and from animals such as quaggas, mammoths, moas and marsupial wolves. The first analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Neanderthals was published in 1997.
The specimen was taken from the first Neanderthal fossil discovered, from Feldhofer Cave, in the Neander Valley, Germany. A small sample of bone was ground up to extract mtDNA.
The Neanderthal mtDNA sequences were substantially different from modern human mtDNA (Krings et al. 1997, 1999). Researchers compared the Neanderthal to modern human and chimpanzee sequences. Most human sequences differ from each other by on average 8.0 substitutions, while the human and chimpanzee sequences differ by about 55.0 substitutions. The Neanderthal and modern human sequences differed by approximately 27.2 substitutions. Using this mtDNA information, the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans dates to approximately 550,000 to 690,000 years ago, which is about four times older than the modern human mtDNA pool. This is consistent with the idea that Neanderthals did not contribute substantially to modern human genome.
A second mtDNA sequence, announced in 2000, was derived from a 29,000 year old Neanderthal found in Mezmaiskaya Cave, Russia (Ovchinnikov et al. 2000). Although the Mezmaiskaya Cave sequence was slightly different than the Feldhofer Neanderthal, the two Neanderthal mtDNA sequences were distinct from those of modern humans. These results confirmed the earlier findings that showed that Neanderthals were unlikely to have contributed to the modern human genome. As with the previous study of Neanderthal mtDNA, results were consistent with separation between the Neanderthal and modern human gene pools or with very low amounts of gene flow between the two groups.
Further mtDNA sequences confirme
quoted fro. the Smithsonian website.
