Neanderthal Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

waited. By now it was mid-December, and Anne had told us earlier that she planned to fly to North Carolina to visit her parents over Christmas. I obviously could not tell her to cancel, much as I wished she would. Finally, after almost two weeks, the phone rang. Anne had sequenced five molecules from her new PCR products. All of them contained the two substitutions we had seen in our Neanderthal sequence—substitutions that are rare or absent in modern humans. This was an enormous relief. I felt we all deserved a Christmas break. We called Ralf in Bonn to relay the good news. As I’d often done during my years in Munich, I celebrated New Year by taking a skiing trip with some wildlife biologists to remote valleys in the Alps on the Austrian border. This time, while skiing up the spectacular valleys, I could not refrain from formulating the paper  that would describe the first DNA sequence from a Neanderthal. To me, what we were about to describe was even more spectacular than the steep and snowy landscape surrounding me.
    Matthias and I met up again in the lab after Christmas vacations and sat down to write our paper. One major question was where to send it. Nature, the British journal, and its American counterpart Science, enjoy the most prestige and visibility in the scientific community and in the general media, and either would have been an obvious choice. But they both impose strict length limits on manuscripts, and I wanted to explain all the details of what we had done—not only to convince the world that we had the real thing but also to promote our painstaking methods of extracting and analyzing ancient DNA. In addition, I had become disenchanted with both journals because of their tendency to publish flashy ancient DNA results that did not meet the scientific criteria our group considered necessary. They often seemed more interested in publishing papers that would give them coverage in the New York Times and other major media outlets than in making sure the results were sound and likely to hold up.
    I discussed all this with Tomas Lindahl, a Swedish-born scientist at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory in London. Tomas, a preeminent expert in DNA damage, is soft-spoken, yet not one to shy away from controversy when he knows he’s right. He has been something of a mentor to me since 1985, when I spent six weeks in his laboratory studying chemical damage in ancient DNA. Tomas suggested we send the paper to Cell, a highly respected and influential journal that specializes in molecular and cell biology. Publication there would send a signal to the community that the sequencing of ancient DNA was solid molecular biology and not just about the production of sexy but questionable results; moreover, Cell allowed long articles. Tomas called its celebrated editor, Benjamin Lewin, to gauge his interest, since such a manuscript was somewhat outside Cell’ s usual scope. Lewin told us to submit it and he would send it out for the usual peer review. This was great news. We now had sufficient space in which to describe all our experiments and present all the arguments for why we were convinced we had genuine Neanderthal DNA.
    Today, I still consider this paper to be one of my best. In addition to describing the painstaking way in which we had reconstructed the mtDNA sequence and why we considered it genuine, it laid out the evidence that our mtDNA sequence fell outside the range of variation seen today and the  implication that Neanderthals had not contributed mtDNA to modern humans. These conclusions were compatible with the out-of-Africa model of human evolution that Allan Wilson, Mark Stoneking, and others had proposed. As my colleagues and I said in our paper: “The Neandertal mtDNA sequence thus supports a scenario in which modern humans arose recently in Africa as a distinct species and replaced Neandertals with little or no interbreeding.”
    We also tried to describe all the caveats we could think of. In