PHILADELPHIA — In an unprecedented feat of forensic anthropology, European researchers extracted enough DNA from two Neanderthal skulls to suggest their owners sported red hair and white skin back when they were alive 43,000 and 50,000 years ago.
The hair color of man's closest relative might sound trivial, but the finding, announced in today's issue of the journal Science, stunned anthropologists with the sheer power of genetics to reveal what Neanderthals really looked like and how they behaved. And that, some say, will change the way humanity views itself.
"We are building an image of these Neanderthal people — their physical aspects, cognitive abilities, metabolism, immunity — the range is enormous," said Carles Lalueza-Fox of Barcelona, Spain, an author of the paper.
Last week, the same team announced that Neanderthals and today's humans share a gene associated with language.
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Until now, our understanding of Neanderthals was limited mostly to bone structure and artifacts. We knew they used stone tools, were stockier than we are and had prominent brow ridges.
Only in the last several years has genetics technology advanced enough to read the much-degraded DNA lodged in Neanderthal bone cells.
"My feeling is this will revolutionize the study of human origins," said Harold Dibble, a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Scientists found the first Neanderthal fossils 150 years ago in Germany's Neander Valley. Since then, enough fossils surfaced to show their lineage branched off from ours about 500,000 years ago, in Africa.
It's a relatively recent split compared with the one our lineage made from the chimpanzees' line around 6 million years ago.
So how did the researchers know that their extracted genetic variant led to red-haired, white Neanderthals? Both the Neanderthal and modern versions hold the recipe for a similarly disabled version of a protein, said Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University.
The scientists were able to artificially reproduce the Neanderthal version of this protein in the lab, she said, thus demonstrating that it worked the same way as the one found in some modern redheads.
