Welcome to the era of Neandertal genetics. Researchers announced this week that they have retrieved and analyzed a huge chunk of Neandertal DNA, covering more than 1 million of the roughly 3 billion* paired chemical constituents of an individual’s genetic makeup.
Until now, scientists had extracted small DNA segments from Neandertal bones, mainly from mitochondria outside cell nuclei (SN: 4/1/00, p.
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