Cave Man Genetics

The mid-semester pile-up has yielded a big gap between this post and the last one, and I still don't have the time I need to get a few of the posts I have rolling around in my head digitized. But an NPR story I heard recently inspired me to attempt a little something.

Perhaps the coolest research project being conducted on our planet right now is the complete sequencing of the Neanderthal genome being undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Neanderthals, you may know, were a distinct species of the same genus as us (homo), and, we believe, the only homo species to be on the earth at the same time as modern humans. They may have died out as recently as 27,000 years ago, and as a result there are quite a few fossil around from which viable DNA can be extracted.

Sequencing the Neanderthal genome (which will likely take about two more years before its all done) is exciting for obvious reasons: Neanderthals are much closer to us on the evolutionary tree than anything alive and comparing our DNA with theirs can tell us a lot about what sorts of evolutionary changes had to take place to make us who we are.

The work has obvious theological implications as well. Christian theology takes the relationship between God and man to be a privileged one. Only man is created in God's image and given the responsibility of caretaker for creation. But what about Neanderthal? Modern man and Neanderthal were on earth at the same time and may have even interbred. Did the special God-man relationship extend to Neanderthal as well or does he fall in to the category of the creation that man was put in charge of back in Genesis? If the latter, what is it that separated homo neanderthalensis from homo sapiens? We know Neanderthal had some higher cognitive skills since he used 'advanced' tools. But did he have language? A sense of morals? Abstract reasoning? Until now there has been no way to answer such questions, but the genome projects underway should, at the very least, narrow down the range of possibilities and sharpen our idea of precisely what it means to be human.