Scientists are to bring Neanderthal “miniature brains” to life to see how humans differ to their closest relatives.
The tiny blobs of tissue, around the size of a lentil, will be grown from human stem cells edited to contain Neanderthal DNA, according to reports.
The so-called brain organoids are incapable of thoughts or feelings but will replicate the basic structures of an adult brain.
Prof Svante Pääbo, director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where the experiments will take place, told the Guardian: “Neanderthals are the closest relatives to everyday humans, so if we should define ourselves as a group or a species it is really them that we should compare ourselves to.
“We’re seeing if we can find basic differences in how nerve cells function that may be a basis for why humans seem to be cognitively so special.”
Scientists have made a raft of recent discoveries about Neanderthals. It last year emerged that although they are often portrayed in drawings as swarthy, they in fact arrived in Northern Europe thousands of years before modern humans, giving time for their skin to become paler as their bodies struggled to soak up enough sun.
When they interbred with modern humans those pale genes were passed on.
correct, and while still the size of a lentil, the brain will be smarter than the average blacks'
Jonathan Miller
brainlet.
Jose Ramirez
Yes, while larger in size than a lentil, African brains have been shown to be no more capable than a black-eyed pea.
Jordan Nguyen
I thought whiteness reflected light? Or does that not matter because of the whole "lacking melanin" thing?
Oliver Gray
Weren't the Neanderthals cognitively far ahead of humans? I remember reading that Neanderthal farming implements were so far advanced compared to Homo-Sapiens that they would actually share food with our ancestors when we'd be suffering from famine since we were useful for killing large prey.
Liam King
yeus
Aiden Miller
neanderthals are just arbitrary distinction for human if they were alive today they'd be just another race
Grayson Fisher
i thought science told us we were all niggers 40,000 years ago?
Nathan Reed
Despite being called white, white skin is just a pale shade of brown. The entire reason for melanin is to protect you from UV rays, that's why you get tanned when out in the sun long enough.
Sebastian James
The deal behind skin color differences is that originally our ancestors were all black, then when populations migrated out of Africa into northern latitudes they couldn't get enough Vitamin D from the weaker sunlight intensity, creating a selective pressure toward lighter skin that more easily produced Vitamin D at the cost of less protection from sunlight. The various shades of people in the world consequently indicate the amount of sunlight their ancestral populations were regularly exposed to.
They were generally superior to our ancestors except for the fact that they consumed more food to survive than ours did. Once the Ice Age ended, they ended up outbred by the ancestors of the common man.
Kayden Wood
All except the Neanderthals.
Parker Mitchell
Too early, it was about 130,000 years ago that the human ancestor Heidelbergensis began diverging into neanderthals and homo sapiens.
That said, human skin color is way too broad to make a reliable means of classifying people; Africa is just way too fucking huge with too many morphologically distinct races as compared to Europe. Counting all Africans as the same is like saying that caucasians and mongols are close enough to count as the same race.
The Out-of-Africa theory has been proven to be wrong.
Logan Moore
No, it actually hasn't. Not at all. and it's not a 'theory'. It's funny watching how desperate you are to try and fabricate bullshit, simply because you're jealous of blacks, because they get white pussy while you already purchased your single ticket to go see SOLO by yourself.
Bentley Gomez
One has to wonder: if you were actually capable of getting a girl, would you still harbor all of your bitter jealous towards niggers?
Anthony Jackson
So nigger brains.
Nathan Powell
What are they going to do when the mini brains start raping and robbing each other? Would it be racist to exterminate them?
Brandon Brown
This was precisely what I meant when I mentioned a fundamental misunderstanding about the theory. It's a theory about when the migration from Africa occurred, not whether it happened at all; even the alternative theories accept that human ancestry did originate in Africa. It is already known and accepted to have happened at some point, the quibbling is over how recently it happened.
But for the sake of argument, let's hear your worldshaking evidence that all the major theories are off point; that human ancestry was not centered in Africa at all.
