Mailund on the Internet

Actually, I have no particular reason to believe that Neanderthals should be dumber than Homo sapience. Well, they were around for thousands of years with very little if any development in the kind of tools they used (or left behind, in any case) while we have managed to improve on tool design quite frequently.

At least lately, I don’t know how fast we were innovating in the stone age.

In any case, what I wanted to go with this is to this page that describes a study of Neanderthal and Homo sapience tools and conclude that they were equally efficient.

Does this mean that Neanderthals were as smart as us?  I guess it doesn’t necessarily, but at least they were as technically advanced.

How did we outcompete them, exactly, and why are they gone?

Reading through a page at Nature about metagenomics (probably requires subscription…) I saw this sentence:

“The biggest metagenomic project on Earth might be our Neanderthal genome project,” says Egholm. They are using 454 to sequence the complete genome of a Neanderthal, which Egholm says they hope to release by the end of the year. But 95–98% of the DNA in the Neanderthal sample comes from the environment rather than from a Neanderthal. This means that to get the 1 coverage, or roughly 3 billion base pairs, of the genome, the team must sequence somewhere between 70 billion to 100 billion base pairs of these environmental samples.

Sequencing the Neanderthal must be quite some challenge! Of course, contamination by bacteria should be fairly easy to discover and get rid of compared to contamination by the humans doing the sequences. We are just too closely related to the Neanderthal for that to be a simple task.

Of course, the Neanderthal specimens are handled carefully, but some contamination is unavoidable.  How much of a problem it is, I do not know, though.  I tried googling for it, but didn’t really find any consistent answers.

I look forward to getting my hands on the Neanderthal sequence, though.  I would love running it through our CoalHMM analysis!