What makes us different from Neanderthal Man?

Deutsch: Rekonstruierter Neandertaler im Neanderthal-Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This video is about a study of Neanderthal DNA and how their genome differed from ours. The differences are important since chimps are our closest living relatives. Neanderthal was much closer in capabilities so the differences will be interesting to discover. I have one problem in thinking DNA is the sole cause of our differences. That is that epigenetics plays a major role. Chimps have mostly the same DNA as we do but their epigenetics is very different. It is similar to a MAC and a PC running on the same Intel Chip. The hardware (DNA) is the same but the systems are very different in their implementation of that hardware. Neanderthal might have a very similar genome to us but a very different epigenome. Time will tell.

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• Did Humans and Neanderthals Have Sex? (spittoon.23andme.com)
• New DNA evidence could explain what happened to the Neanderthals (io9.com)
• Scientists say you’re not the Neanderthal they used to think (independent.co.uk)
• Research raises doubts about whether modern humans and Neanderthals interbred (sciencedaily.com)
• Humans, Neanderthals related to yet another group (lightyears.blogs.cnn.com)
• It Turns Out We Might Not be Descended From Neanderthals After All (gizmodo.co.uk)
• Study casts doubt on human-Neanderthal interbreeding theory (guardian.co.uk)
• Signs Found of Mysterious Neanderthal ‘Sister Species’ (newser.com)
• High quality Denisovan genome sheds light on human evolution (arstechnica.com)
• African genome project shows unknown hominid ancestor. (cofcc.org)

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