Here’s more information on the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome made by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He wants to know if earlier human genes were passed on to Neanderthals, and if the Neanderthal genome, when compared with what is known about modern human and chimpanzee DNA, […]

Explosive changes in DNA called copy number variations are the likely cause of what makes humans and great apes unique, according to an article in Nature. “These are really like volcanoes in the genome, blowing out pieces of DNA,” said geneticist Evan Eichler of the University of Washington.    A second article gives a further explanation […]