We all know that the Neandertal genome is riddled with contamination from modern humans. Isn the null hypothesis that we have a modern human sequence here because it is a modern human?
Well, as you know, I’m not all that convinced that contamination explains the interpretive discrepancies between last year’s genome papers. But still, this study has done some things to address the problem of contamination. It is notable that Green et al. (2006) found 25% modern human mtDNA in one of the El Sidrón bones: this shows that even “sterile” excavation, immediate freezing and extraction under clean-room conditions cannot exclude contamination. There is at the moment nothing more that can be done. We will always have the problem of a contamination fraction in ancient Neandertal skeletons. So we have to judge each study by the extent to which we can exclude contaminants with statistical analysis. For this study, Krause et al. (2007) developed a test of nuclear DNA contamination: they identified seven gene variants that differ between the recovered Vindija Vi 33.16 nuclear genome and all known living humans. In other words, these are human-derived mutations that are absent from
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- We all know that the Neandertal genome is riddled with contamination from modern humans. Isn the null hypothesis that we have a modern human sequence here because it is a modern human?
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