The Neanderthal Genome is out (preliminary)!!!

A birthday present for Darwin, as the article puts it, a preliminary assessment of the Neanderthal genome is out. This will be fascinating. They don't have the lactose gene (couldn't drink milk as adults) and they do have FOXP2, important for speech. The resource cannot be found.Great news! National GeographicEdited by bluegenes, : second link added

For those interested in historic announcements, here's the video of the neanderthal genome press conference. It's about an hour long. Press conference video

Any mention yet of human chromosome 2 or ERV patterns as relate to Neanderthals?

I only watched half of the video before being called away. They've only actually got 2/3 of the genome so far. I gathered that they're farming out the info to several different groups round the world, and that we can expect stuff trickling in over the next few months. They did mention the number of SNP differences they had identified so far, but I forget the figure.I doubt if they've got down to comparing pro-viruses, and I would assume that Neanderthal have our fused chromosome 2. I once worked out that it would take a very small bottleneck for a fused chromosome to fix across a population, and it could have happened since our divergence from them, but it would have meant that we were precariously close to extinction in the last few hundred thousand years!So, I afraid it's not as immediately exciting as I initially thought on hearing the announcement (I posted immediately before looking at the video as I thought others online might be interested.)

Sure, haven`t you heard of the Fludd? :-p

Here's paleoanthropologist John Hawks on the subject with some interesting points.