GENETICS

The Dead Begin to Speak

1997 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In 1997, DNA recovered from the arm bone of the first Neanderthal ever named, found in 1856, yielded a mitochondrial sequence unlike any living person's: the first genetic message from an extinct human. The reading, from overlapping amplified fragments under obsessive controls, placed Neanderthals outside modern variation and, wrongly as the nuclear genome later showed, out of our ancestry. A discipline was founded along with its discovery: molecular time travel, and the art of not fooling oneself.

Why it matters

Before this, the deep past spoke only through stones and bones; afterwards it had genetics, and questions of ancestry, migration and admixture became answerable rather than arguable. The 1997 result also set the field's enduring lesson in humility, its own headline conclusion was overturned by better data thirteen years later. Every ancient genome on this timeline, Denisovan, Tianyuan, plague, descends from this bone.

Dating & uncertainty

The 1997 sequence came from the original Neandertal specimen of 1856, and concluded, from mitochondrial DNA alone, that Neanderthals left no trace in us; the nuclear genome overturned that in 2010. The field's early years were a school of rigour: contamination by modern DNA mimics results so well that dedicated clean rooms, independent replication and damage signatures became the price of belief.

Sources

1. Krings et al. (1997), Cell · Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humansdoi:10.1016/s0092-8674(00)80310-4
2. Krings et al. (1999), PNAS · DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable region II from the Neandertal type specimendoi:10.1073/pnas.96.10.5581
3. Gilbert et al. (2005), Trends in Ecology & Evolution · Assessing ancient DNA studiesdoi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.07.005

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:528.0 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day