Origins of Modern Europeans

Over the past ten years the analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has become widespread when dealing with very low quantities of and/or highly degraded DNA. The advantages of mtDNA for this type of analysis have been well documented including its high copy number, which improves the chance of retrieving DNA, and its highly polymorphic, and therefore informative nature. In addition to forensic studies, mtDNA has been widely used in the study of ancient DNA (aDNA). In 1997 aDNA was reported to have been successfully extracted from a Neanderthal recovered from the Feldhofer Cave in Germany (1). This information was used to examine the origins of the modern European mtDNA pool. However, with only one Neanderthal sequence and no information about the molecular variation of Neanderthals, comparisons with modern human DNA could only be taken so far. Also, because of a number of unsubstantiated claims from the field of aDNA in previous years, some skepticism remained about the source of the “Neanderthal DNA” despite the stringent controls used. In the following article we discuss the second successful isolation of Neanderthal DNA along with the evolutionary significance of the data.