I love this post as I had recently watched a fascinating show about the Neanderthals and have been contemplating the implications of their existence ever since, so this post is apropos for me.

Long time reader, never commented since I’m too much of a Neaderthal.

In the case of hominins, that is modern humans and their close relatives such as Cro-Magnons, Neandertals, and Homo floresiensis (Brown et al, 2004), the issue of authenticity [of a DNA sequence] is particularly acute because they can be expected to be identical to current humans for much or almost all of their genome. For example, although morphologically distinct, Neandertals were so closely related to people living today that most Neandertal DNA fragments retrieved from a fossil are expected to carry no sequence differences to the corresponding human sequences (Pääbo, 1999). As human DNA is a very common contaminant in fossils and laboratory experiments, this makes it particularly challenging to ascertain the authenticity of Neandertal DNA sequences. Indeed, for Cro-Magnons and other modern humans, the problems are so severe that over the past 15 years we have been pessimistic over the prospects of ever reliably determining such DNA sequences (Pääbo et al, 2004).

In other words: we might clone a Neanderthal that turns out to not be Neanderthal at all.

Archaeologists, however, currently seem to be of the opinion that Neanderthals matured more quickly than we do and had fairly short lifespans. (And Brian’s point about children is of course another good one.)

Now if we trusted the Sumerian King List rather than the Bible, our antediluvian ancestors would have lived not hundreds, but tens of thousands of years. Forget Methuselah; I’d like to see the skeletons of legendary Sumerian geezers like En-sipad-zid-ana (reportedly reigned some 28,800 years).