NEANDERTHAL MAN: IN SEARCH OF LOST GENOMES

It seems that the Scientific and Medical Network publishes a lot of spiritual commentary and not so much pertaining to mainstream scientific analysis. Much as I like spiritual commentary and reviews of books of this genre, I sometimes wonder whether we shouldn't be paying more attention to the scientific and medical mainstream. I think I understand this oversight, which has to do with a SMN aversion to a certain brand of formulaic science, often branded as narrow scientism, which is not receptive to alternative, imaginative approaches which we intuit as necessary to advance new paradigms. Thus, we are inclined to comment, as if we were sociologists, on the effect that too much scientism and technology has on society and its educational, commercial and political institutions. All this commentary is fine if we don't miss good science when we see it. Perhaps we are destined to react to most new paradigms (e.g., evolution, ecology, quantum physics) only after the fact when we have had time to assimilate them and the impact they have had on undermining old paradigms. There may be a psychological component to all this: our intuitions tell us that new paradigms are necessary to move us beyond the old questions and problems that cannot be solved by "old thinking." In aspiring to understand and realise our human (and scientific) potential more fully, we may jump the gun in dismissing the old order before the new is adequately appreciated. It takes analysts in the trenches to tackle bits of the problem, and build up "data" and "information" before the holistic synthesisers formulate the new paradigm. Call it the "100th monkey effect," something in the air, or simply the fact that the time is right (Kairos). We only come to know what we know more fully when we better appreciate the context, and that often requires a participatory group effort that shifts the collective consciousness.

Recently (Network 114) I penned a couple of reviews on more or less typical books concerned with the archaeological evidence bearing on the elusive quest to understand our human origins, including our relationship to Neanderthals, which we increasingly recognise as tied up with not only anthropological but also linguistic, psychological and spiritual questions. In Neanderthal Man by Svante Pääbo (his choice of traditional masculine label) we approach the problem entirely though genomic analysis. As this is not my forte perhaps I am not well qualified to judge the analytical merits of the exposition. However, readers might be interested in the glimpses that Pääbo gives us into the cutting edge scientific culture which he and leaders in his field seem to take in their stride. In their world the editors of Science and Nature often hover like expectant hawks eager to schedule press conferences and snap up the latest results of Neanderthal genome analyses. The rest of us, if we aspire to publish in such journals, can expect a 99% rejection rate, often before our contributions are even reviewed! No matter, each generation has its scientific fashions and in 21st century anthropology and paleontology it has become conventional wisdom to recognise that anatomical similarity is no guarantee of close biological relationship, even though such a traditional rule of thumb is not without merit, as shown by close similarities between Neanderthals and modern humans. Rather, advances in the ability to extract genetic material from extinct species (mostly from the recent Ice Age), have led to the ability to amplify these "bits" and compare them with the genomes of living relatives. Thus, and you be the judge, one might measure the closer genetic similarity between a mammoth and Asian elephant (the African species is more distant) or between the extinct ground sloth and its closer relationship to its 2-toed relative (rather than to the 3-toed species). Again these are measures of genetic rather than absolute or universal similarity.

Pääbo, now the director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, came by his expertise honestly in the traditional academic fashion, serving various apprenticeships studying Egyptian mummies, cave bear and mammoth DNA, and learning the different potentials of mitochondrial (mt) DNA and nuclear DNA, how to amplify gene fragments using now-standard PCR (polymerase chain reactions) to create libraries, how to spot errors in the sequences and how often to repeat, refine and check analyses to verify results and avoid unnecessary pitfalls. Such procedures allow practitioners to claim "scientific rigour." At the same time they acknowledge, as one chapter heading admits, that " the devil is in the details," beginning with the extraction of tiny fragments from within Neanderthal bone, where DNA is least likely to be degraded. [Recognizable soft tissue has even been extracted from within dinosaur bone]. It requires PCR to clone multiple sequences and clusters of powerful computers to run the analyses that produce tens of millions of sequence fragments available for comparison with modern sequences, which includes the identification and removal of bits of DNA recognisable as bacterial, or from modern humans such as lab workers. Then comes the process of identifying bits of DNA that differ from that of modern humans in the positions of a small number of their familiar nucleotides (A,T,G,C). Multiple clones of each putative Neanderthal fragment, from two PCR experiments, are subjected to multiple analyses before any pattern is considered diagnostic on the basis of consistent reproducibility. To the non-specialist such as myself, it seems that the various steps are delicate and complicated, creating many chances for error to creep in. But geneticists in this field are usually vigilant and ready to spot such errors, and re-run their analyses to correct and refine the product. In fact, much of the literature deals with refining and testing methodologies and finding ways to clone and amplify DNA fragments, without distortion or contamination, in order to create libraries that are available for future researchers to examine and re-analyse.

So what is the punch line? Did we entirely replace Neanderthals some 30-50,000 years ago, becoming what Pääbo calls the "replacement crowd"? Are Neanderthal genes still scattered evenly, or unevenly in modern human populations, implying interbreeding, or even happy coexistence as a period of similar, even shared tool technologies implies? Genetically, this seems to be the case at the level of about 2%, a result that caused Pääbo to reassess some of his earlier work. Are, or will those with more Neanderthal genes be stigmatised as brutes or worshiped as especially revered ancestors!? Will companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com reliably tell us how much Neanderthal DNA we have mixed with that of Vikings, Aztecs or Polynesians? Could such companies, or Pääbo and his gang, patent the Neanderthal genome? Pääbo's answer is no: they shared, as did the Neanderthals!!

In the last few chapters Pääbo turns from genetics to more fundamental and ambiguous questions about "human essence." (What made moderns ascendant over Neanderthals?) He admits that " the dirty little secret of genetics is that we still know next to nothing about how a genome translates into the particularities of living and breathing individual." [Particles do not make particularities!] Such candour is refreshing, and gives non-geneticists hope that other avenues of exploration will not inevitably be trumped by results from giant cloning machines and supercomputers. In the end when Pääbo and his team published their Neanderthal genome paper (in Science 2010) with 174 pages of supplemental material, it was "more like a book than a scientific paper" offering data that "would be applied, as a tool that would allow others to extend their own research" with no patent restrictions.

Given that these results all derive from a few milligrams of bone dust, skeptics may say that specialised science learns more and more about less and less. But even if there are doubts about the quality of DNA extracted from bone and the accuracy of cloning and amplifying methods, many geneticists in the trenches are aware of the pitfalls and the areas where they "know next to nothing." Our ignorance in these areas is not the fault of a defunct scientific paradigm, and if it were we would all have to take responsibility for failure to achieve full enlightenment. Rather, it seems to me that part of the "human essence" of us moderns is that we have rather high expectations for novel future paradigms and future insights, whether arrived at by cloning machines and supercomputers or natural intuitive insight. Did Neanderthals look to a future or afterlife, as they evidently did when they began burying their dead, and could they have conceived of being immortalised in the 21st century in books and genetic libraries compiled from the dust of their bones?