The Quest for the ‘Genius Gene’

Yes, it’s probably the one we had and they didn’t.
This is what the latest research findings also point to. The Neanderthals walked off the Earth about 30,000 years leaving it for us the Homo Sapiens. Research also shows that we are not the descendents of our extinct relatives.

Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens did have a common ancestor who lived about 700,000 years ago. About 370,000 years ago we decided to part ways along the evolutionary path from our cousins and in the natural selection process we emerged victorious and our cousins went extinct.

Two independent teams were working on the DNA of a 38,000 year old Neanderthal fossil found in Vindija, Croatia. One team was led by Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced about 0.03% of the 3-billion base-pair Neanderthal genome. The other team at the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California was led by Edward Rubin. They sequenced about 69,000 base pairs.

The results from both quarters have been similar. We are 99.5% similar but the 0.5% is not a small thing. It could be because of that 0.5% that we are here and they are not. The research aims at completing the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome in the next two years, and it will open new doors to our evolutionary history.

Anatomically the humans emerged about 150,000 years ago in Africa but reached Europe only about 36,000 years ago. On the other hand, what the Neanderthals called home covered all of Europe and West Asia. The chimpanzees who were also a part of the family tree split from the human branch about 6.5 million years ago and now they claim that the Neanderthals and us diverged too.

There teams have not analyzed a large number of base pairs to find something drastically different, but there are some differences and there are results that show that there never was significant inter-species breeding. For researchers it is an astonishing and path breaking find with the possible prospects for the future even more mind blowing.

Once the entire draft of the Neanderthal genome is complete we hope to find something which made us different from them. It could be the ‘genius gene’ which made us what we are today, that made us the better one in the process of natural selection. It would be particularly interesting to look for the microcephalin gene, a contributor to the form of the brain, in Neanderthals as it had been suggested that this was introduced to Homo sapiens quite recently, perhaps through interbreeding with Neanderthals.

Yes, maybe it was indeed some ‘loser gene’ that the Neanderthals had that did them but as always there is another side of the story too. They were hardier and more resistant to cold, stronger, they matured more quickly and they appear to have had more robust hearts and circulatory systems, now isn’t that a trait which we humans would like to embed ? Yes, is what the most probable answer will be.

It will be a while before that happens. Once the draft is complete, the Neanderthal genes will be replicated synthetically and introduced into rats to study the effect. And at a later stage when we have enough know how and then someday we’ll introduce that into our babies. Will this be a reality or just an idle brain’s imagination at work only time can tell.

For now we can just say, we have it and they didn’t.