Next, what are they finding in terms of possible functional genetic differences?
Preliminary results suggest that Neanderthals were lactose intolerant, hardly surprising since the ability to digest dairy products in adulthood only became common in humans after the domestication of cows, 10,000 years ago. Hmm…. Now you begin to see the problem with working with the sequence. The things that confirm what you thought should be there become so much easier to accept. Nearly half the lactase haplotypes in Croatia today are the non-persistent version. Find enough things that look the way they ought to look, and you start having more and more confidence. But then, you’ll likely be biased against finding things that are surprising! Twenty thousand genes is a lot of work. We have some projects in mind here, so we’re eagerly waiting for results.
