8/2/2019 Ancient DNA Reveals Neandertals With Red Hair, Fair
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What would it have been like to meet a Neandertal? Researchers
have hypothe-sized answers for decades, seeking to putflesh on
ancient bones. But fossils are silenton many traits, from hair and
skin color tospeech and personality.
Personality will have to wait, but in a paper published online
in Science this week (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/
1147417), an international team announcesthat it has extracted a
pigmentation gene, mc1r ,from the bones of two Neander tals.
Theresearchers conclude that at least some Nean-dertals had pale
skin and red hair, similar tosome of the Homo sapiens who today
inhabittheir European homeland. The paper comes onthe heels of one
that used similar techniques toshow that Neandertals shared the
modernhuman form of the only gene so far known toinfluence human
speech, FOXP2 . Althoughresearchers are working to sequence the
entire
Neandertal genome ( Science , 17 Novem-
ber 2006, p. 1068), these are the first spe-cific nuclear genes
to be retrieved.These are the two genes youd most like to see from
a Neandertal,explains Svante Pbo of the MaxPlanck Institute for
EvolutionaryAnthropology in Leipzig, Ger-many, who led the FOXP2
study.
The mc1r paper is logical, ele-gant, and convincing, says
anthro-
pologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsyl-vania State University in
Univer-sity Park. Its a great paper, agreesmolecular geneticist and
pigmenta-tion expert Rick Sturm of theUniversity of Queensland
inSt. Lucia, Australia.
Many of the Neandertalscavorting in museum dioramasaround the
world already have paleskin or red hair, because anthropol-ogists
have long predicted this col-oration on the basis of
evolutionarytheory. The dark skin beneficial inAfrica offers no
advantage at highlatitudes, and in cloudy Europe,
pale skin facilitates vitamin D production,Jablonski says. But
there was no proof of
Neandertalslooks until a team led by CarlesLalueza-Fox of the
University of Barcelonain Spain and Holger Rmpler of the
Univer-sity of Leipzig in Germany set out to retrievethe mc1r gene
from a 43,000-year-old Nean-dertal from El Sidrn, Spain, and a
50,000-year-old specimen from Monti Lessini, Italy.
MC1R is a cell membrane receptor thathelps regulate the balance
between red-and-yellow-colored pheomelanin and black-and-
brown-colored eumelanin. Living people withvariations that make
the receptor work poorlytend to have red hair and pale skin,
althoughother pigmentation genes also have strongeffects ( Science
, 2 March, p. 1215).
Using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)to target and amplify
the gene, the researchersfound a point mutation not seen in
livinghumans. They checked about 3700 people,including everyone
involved in the project,
to be sure that the variant was unique to
Neandertals. Next, they explored the variantsfunction by
expressing it in human cells and found that it impaired the
receptors activity. If you have a variant with this low action in
mod-ern humans, you get classically Irish-lookingred hair and pale
skin in homozygotes, peoplewith two copies of the variant, says
team mem-
ber Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Insti-tute in Leipzig.
The researchers calculate thatat least 1 in 100 Neandertals would
have beenhomozygotes. Thus Neandertals and Hom
sapiens in Europe followed independentevolutionary paths to a
similar phenotype,Lalueza-Fox says.
Im convinced that what theyre saying isreal, says Sturm, who has
used similar func-
tional assays to check mc1r variants in living people.
Lalueza-Fox adds that Neandertalsmay have carried a variety of
changes in mc1as we do, and so may have had a spectrum of skin and
hair colors.
Pbo and colleagues also used targeted PCR to isolate the FOXP2
gene. They chose
FOXP2 because people with mutations in thegene have impaired
speech. Pbos team had
previously traced the gene in living peopleand suggested that
the unique human variantwas selected relatively recently, less
than200,000 years agolong after Neandertals
and modern humans had diverged ( Scienc16 August 2002, p. 1105).
The implicationwas that Neandertals lacked the modernhuman form,
Pbo says.
But to their surprise, thats not what theyfound when they
sequenced the gene from two
bones from El Sidrn, where Lalueza-Fox runsa clean excavation
for DNA analysis. Both
bones carried the modern human version of FOXP2 . That doesnt
necessarily mean Nean-dertals spoke as we do, because many
genes
presumably influence speech. But from the point of view of the
one gene we know, theresnothing to say that Neandertals were
differentfrom us in their language abilities, Pbo says.
Because the Neandertal FOXP2 genmatched that found in living
people,Pbos team used extra controls to try torule out
contamination with modern humanDNA. For example, they sequenced
the
Neandertal Y chromosome and found that itdiffered from that of
living men at five keysites. No contamination of the Y chromo-some
strengthens the case that the FOXPresult is real, Pbo says.
The Y chromosome finding also argues
Ancient DNA Reveals Neandertals With Red Hair, Fair
Complexions
GENETICS
26 OCTOBER 2007 VOL 318 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org
Ginger man. Some Neandertals had red hair and pale skin, as seen
inthis reconstruction of a French fossil.
Published by AAAS
8/2/2019 Ancient DNA Reveals Neandertals With Red Hair, Fair
Complexions (2007)
2/2www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 318 26 OCTOBER 2007
FOCUS Special report:Battling malaria
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against interbreeding between Neandertals and the modern humans
then entering Europe. Ifind it paradoxical in some ways,
saysLalueza-Fox, who is an author of both studies.The papers make
Neandertals more like mod-ern Europeans, with light skin and hair
color and language abilities, and yet there are nosigns of
interbreeding with modern humans.
But others arent yet ready to concede that
either contamination or mixing has been com- pletely ruled out.
The additional controls giveone more confidence that contamination
is nota problem, but we cant be 100% sure, saysevolutionary
geneticist Jeff Wall of the Univer-sity of California, San
Francisco, who inAugust reported what he saw as contaminationin
Pbos groups bulk Neandertal sequencing(Science NOW, 29 Aug ust,
scie ncen ow.
sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/829/4).Wall adds that if
the FOXP2 result is real, it
possible that Neandertals acquired the human FOXP2 variant by
mixing. If there was admix-ture, it wasnt very much. But we cant
tell if there was a small amount. Pbo says he cantrule out that
scenario but considers itunlikely, given the genetic data so
far.
ELIZABETH CULO
C R E D I T : N
A T A L I E B E H R I N G / B L O O M B E R G N E W S / L A N
D
O V
Use energy more efficiently. Put a price on car-
bon emissions. Develop green energy sources.Those
recommendations on sustainable
development, from a report released thisweek by dozens of the
worlds nationalscience academies, may be familiar. But
thescientists behind the 174-page effort believethat the urgency of
the problem will make upfor its lack of originality in grabbing
theattention of policymakers around the globe,and they intend to
launch a major effort to getthe message out. The goal is to work
fairlydeeply into governments, says Hal Harveyof the Menlo Park,
Californiabased William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which helped fund the report,
dubbed Lighting the Way .The peer-reviewed reports
recommendations
reflect the diverse perspective of the 15 experts,nominated from
more than 90 national acade-mies, working under the auspices of the
7-year-old InterAcademy Council (IAC) in Amsterdam,the Netherlands.
Meeting the basic energyneeds of the poorest people on this planet
is amoral and social imperative that technologytransfer and
international efforts could address, the report begins. On energy
effi-ciency, it recognizes that most building con-struction will
occur in cities of the developingworld, and it calls on local
governments and scientists to develop sustainable
practices.California and Brazil are held up as models for energy
efficiency and the use of biofuels.Report co-chair and director of
LawrenceBerkeley National Laboratory Steven Chucalls the
international flavor of the 2-year effort unique, noting that its
proposed doublingof applied energy research says that the moneymust
be internationally coordinated.
Co-chair Jos Goldemberg, secretary for the environment in So
Paulo, Brazil,
believes that governments are eager to hear those messages, and
he notes that manynational academies in the developing world
already have close ties to governments.The report, requested by the
science acade-mies of Brazil and China, was rolled out thisweek
with a workshop in Beijing and with
plans for a follow-up symposium in Brazil.The Chinese Academy of
Sciences brokered a meeting between Chu and Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao, and CAS President Lu Yongxiangannounced plans, including
the creation of arenewable energy R&D center, to help weanChina
from its heavy dependence on coal. Amajor element, Lu says, will be
a rapid expansion of Chinas nuclear industry, whichcurrently
generates just 1.6% of the nations
power supply.The reports emphasis on the developing
world should be popular in Washington, D.C., predicts Paul
Bledsoe of the nonprofit National Commission on Energy
Policy.Although Bledsoe believes that speedy U.S.
action is a necessary precursor to sustainable policies in the
developing world, he notes thatthe willingness of developing
nations totackle the problem has been the sticking
point [in Washington] all along. Roughlyone-fourth of the
$550,000 the Hewlett Foun-dation spent on the report is devoted to
aninternational media push that would bolster outreach by
individual academies.
Chu hopes the new report will make a big-ger splash than other
academic efforts; previ-ous IAC reports on women in science and
African agriculture, for example, have caused
barely a ripple. His model is the 2005 U.S. National Academies
report on U.S. science priorities, Rising Above the Gatherin gStorm
, that served as the basis for the AmericaCOMPETES Act, which
became law this sum-mer. We didnt make claims for originality,says
Chu, a member of that panel, too. [But]that report was incredibly
successful.
ELI KINTISWith reporting by Richard Stone in Beijing.
National Academies Make Case for Sustainable GrowthENER GY POLIC
Y
Burning issue. New report discusseshow to reconcile Chinas
booming,coal-fueled economy with greendevelopment.
Published by AAAS
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