Tag Archives: Ancient DNA

Why We Should Worry about Neanderthal Clones

February 8, 2010

Should we clone Neanderthals?  That’s the provocative question that science writer and editor Zach Zorich poses in the forthcoming issue of Archaeology,  hitting the news stand on February 15th.  I received an advance copy late last week and read Zorich’s article this weekend. I’ve been thinking about this question ever since, and already I have arrived at my own  answer.  No.  No.  NO.

First of all,  I should point out that this is not a pie-in-the-sky question.  Zorich interviewed an impressive A-list of researchers–including geneticists who are sequencing the Neanderthal genome and leading paleoanthropologists who study ancient hominins–and some clearly believe that a cloned Neanderthal awaits us somewhere down the line.

So it’s not too early to begin thinking and debating about the ethics of cloning one of our hominin kin.  While some researchers champion the idea out of pure scientific curiosity and the desire to learn more about an extinct hominin,  I think it’s a terrible idea.  I simply don’t trust my fellow Homo sapiens sapiens to treat another hominin with kindness and respect.  Our track record with other primates, for example,  is appalling–using chimpanzees for circus shows and laboratory experimentation, hunting gorillas for meat,  and killing orangutan mothers  in order to sell their babies as pets.

And here’s something else that worries me about a Neanderthal clone.  In the 1920s, the Soviet leader  Josef  Stalin ordered the researcher who perfected the technique of artificial insemination,  Ilya Ivanov,  to create a “living war machine. ”  Ivanov’s brief, as American writer Charles Siebert reports  in his remarkable book, The Wachula Woods Accord,  was to artificially inseminate chimpanzees with human sperm to create a new hybrid.

Stalin dreamed of a large,  invincible Red Army and a vast slave workforce to carry out his Five Year Plans.  He thought a chimp-human hybrid would serve admirably. According to Russian newspapers,  Stalin told Ivanov “I want a new invincible human being insensitive to pain,  resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”

Ivanov failed miserably to produce such chimp-human hybrid, though he certainly tried.   In 1930s,  the biologist fell from political grace and was exiled to Kazakhstan in one of the many purges of the time.

All this strikes me as an important cautionary tale.   What if one of the world’s dictators  got it into his head to clone Neanderthals as slave laborers or a new kind of soldier, one physically stronger than modern humans?   It sounds far fetched,  I know.  But I don’t think we can blithely ignore the lessons of history.

Mammoth DNA in Ancient Dirt

December 16, 2009

What can a pinch of dirt from the  Alaska permafrost tell us about the extinction of mammoths and prehistoric horses?  An awful lot,  says an international team of researchers headed by James Haile,  a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen.  By sequencing ancient mitochondrial DNA from soil samples and dating the soil,  Haile and his colleagues concluded that both mammoths and ancient horse species were still grazing Alaskan meadows some 7600 to 10,500 years ago–at least 2500 later than other research suggests.   Their findings have just appeared in an online paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Haile and several of his colleagues have a long-standing interest in the subject of ancient DNA,  and whether this fragile molecule  can really survive degradation over thousands of years in geological layers.   Remember,  we are not talking about ancient DNA encased in animal teeth or bone:  Haile and his colleagues are searching for ancient molecules from urine and faeces in the soil.

Here’s what Haile’s team did in this new study.  They collected permafrost core samples from the tundra near Stevens Village, and dated the layers in the core by two methods:  C14 dating and optically simulated luminescence.  Then the team sequenced the ancient mitochondrial DNA in the layers.  In the stratum dated between 7600 and 10,500 years ago, they discerned the ancient DNA of woolly mammoth,  prehistoric horse, moose,  and snowshoe hare.   In upper layers dated to more recent times, they found moose,  hare, and the like, but no trace of woolly mammoth or prehistoric horse.

Team member Eske Willerslev, an ancient DNA expert at the University of Copenhagen, sees this as the beginning of a whole new era in our studies of the ancient megafauna and their mysterious demise.  “With ancient DNA analysis,”  Willerslev said in a prepared statement, “we are completely independent of skeletons, bones, teeth, and other macrofossil evidence from extinct animals.  This greatly increases the possibility of finding evidence of the existence of a species through time.”  Indeed,  the team has coined a new term for this:  they now talk of identifying “ghost ranges” for the  animals.

All this sounds extremely interesting and exciting.   And if  Haile, Willerslev and their colleagues have it right,  researchers will definitely need to rethink their theories about the demise of the mammoths and other large megafauna. The team’s new proposed extinction dates would not mesh in any way with the arrival of human hunters in the Americas or with a proposed comet strike.

But I confess I am skeptical.  The validity of dirt DNA, for example,  still seems to be a hotly contested issue among ancient DNA experts.   Researchers are still debating, for example,  the authenticity of ancient human DNA extracted from fecal material found Paisley Cave in Oregon, evidence that was used to advance the case of Pre-Clovis humans in the New World.

Big claims require big evidence.   Haile and his colleagues have now put out the idea that researchers can abandon the quest for skeletal evidence and simply take soil samples to pinpoint the demise of the mammoths. Let’s see other research teams duplicate his findings.