The Phillips DNA Project

(ANSA) - Florence, May 17 - An Italian study out this week lends fresh weight to the theory that today's Europeans are not descended from Neanderthals, despite a recent study indicating Neanderthal DNA is common in many modern humans. The research, which appears in the international Public Library of Science journal, compared modern human DNA with that of Neanderthal man, focusing on a gene responsible for a condition known as microcephaly, microcephelin. A variant of the gene appears in a specific genetic grouping known as Haplogroup D, which is one of the categorizations used by scientists to map the early migrations of population groups. Haplogroup D appeared around 37,000 years ago and is now common throughout the world but is extremely rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. "Until now, this particular distribution had been interpreted as evidence that Haplogroup D had originated with Neanderthals," explained a statement by Florence University, which produced the study in collaboration with the universities of Siena and Ferrara, as well as the Milan Institute of Biomedical Technologies and the Verona Natural History Museum. "It was hypothesized that this variant had then been incorporated into the genome of modern humans by admixing between Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians, after they had already left Africa."

However, the Italian experts, who were joined by scientists from Marseilles and Lyons universities for the research, have now proved this was not the case. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome indicates Neanderthals did not have the Haplogroup D gene and are no genetically closer to Europeans than modern Africans. "The study does not prove there was no mixing between different human forms in Europe," the study's coordinator David Caramelli, acknowledged. "However, it certainly shows that speculation over a possible Neanderthal origin for the most widespread variant of the microcephalin gene in European populations is not supported by evidence obtained from ancient DNA. In other words, we cannot exclude that a tiny fraction of our DNA is of Neanderthal origin but we can say for certain that this was not the case with microcephalin." The study appears just days after research published in Science grabbed worldwide headlines after concluding that many modern humans possess some Neanderthal ancestry. Overturning previously held beliefs that Neanderthals had made little or no contribution to our inheritance, the study suggested that between 1% and 4% of modern European and Asian genomes appeared to have come from Neanderthals.