IN A feat that has stretched genetic testing to its limit, scientists have extracted Neanderthal DNA.
The material comes from a fossil that is at least 30,000 years old and will probably end a long and bitter controversy about whether Neanderthals were the ancestors of modern humans.
Researchers said yesterday that it was the first time that DNA had been found in an extinct human. Today the scientists will announce that Neanderthals were not our ancestors but evolved separately from a common precursor and were ousted in Europe by Homo sapiens.
Dr Svante Paabo, of the University of Munich, who led the research, said: "This supports the idea that we all came out of Africa quite recently in history."
The researchers studied the original fossil which gave Neanderthal its name. They extracted and pulverised a tiny piece of bone from which they extracted the DNA. The DNA was mitochondrial, a type passed from mother to daughter largely unaltered, unlike DNA from the cell nucleus .
Dr Paabo compared the mutations in Neanderthal DNA with those in modern human DNA. Two modern humans will have about eight differences in their mitochondrial DNA. The analysis, published in the journal Cell, showed human DNA had 27 differences from Neanderthal DNA. Human DNA differs from chimpanzee DNA in about 57 places.
Dr Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, said it was "a fantastic achievement."
The results reject the theory that Neanderthals, who had large brains, walked upright and used stone tools, were a race of archaic Homo sapiens. Instead it appears that they were a separate species and did not interbreed with early humans.
