In the June 1st issue of Current biology there is a report of a new Neanderthal Mitochondrial DNA sequence:
Revisiting Neandertal diversity with a 100,000 year old mtDNA sequence
Ludovic Orlando, Pierre Darlu, Michel Toussaint, Dominique Bonjean, Marcel Otte, and Catherine Hänni
http://www.current-biology.com/content/issue?volume=16&issue=11DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.019 (not working yet)
There isn't an abstract so here are some quotes:
"Recently, sequences of the hypervariable region-1 (HVR-1) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 9 Neandertal specimens dated between 29,000 and 42,000 years ago from dispersed locations have revealed the genetic diversity of Neandertals around the time of the cohabitation [1–4]. The genetic signatures before and after contact with modern humans were found to be similar. They fall outside the range of modern human genetic diversity and show no specific affinity with modern or Paleolithic Europeans [5].
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We, therefore, retrieved 123 bp of the mtDNA HVR-1 from a 100,000 year old Neandertal tooth from the Scladina cave (Meuse Basin, Belgium), which represents the most ancient Neandertal sample analyzed at the DNA level.
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The Scladina Neandertal sequence has not been found among the 7161 human HVR- I sequences present in the HvrBase++ [16]. It appears more distantly related to the human than to the already reported Neandertal sequences
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When chimpanzee sequences are used as outgroups, the Neandertals appear as monophyletic (bootstrap support 72.3%). When chimpanzee sequences are excluded, the Scladina sequence still clusters with other Neandertal sequences (bootstrap-support 96.5%), excluding all human mtDNA lineages.
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While the diversity of the more recent Neandertals is similar to that of modern humans worldwide, the sequence from Scladina reveals that more divergent Neandertal haplotypes existed before 42,000 years ago. This could suggest that Neandertals experienced genetic drift as demographic bottlenecks eliminated the phylogenetically more recent (i.e. less expanded) haplotypes from populations. Consequently, the most likely conserved Neandertal haplotypes could also be the phylogenetically most ancient (i.e. the most closely related to the common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals).
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the Scladina sequence has revealed that the genetic diversity of Neandertals has been underestimated. Thus, more Neandertal sequences than the six presently available and longer than 100 bp are needed to fully understand the extent of the past diversity of Neandertals."
