Although there is still some debate as to whether Homo Sapians and Neanderthals inter-mated, archeologist C. Michael Barton of Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change believes that they basically “dissolved into a new species as a result of interbreeding” leading to the eventual extinction of the original Neanderthal race as they succumbed to more modern human genes (see http://www.examiner.com/article/did-neanderthals-vanish-from-having-too-...)
Now, George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard’s Medical School believes he’s capable of bringing the long-extinct Neanderthal back to life, if he can only find the right surrogate mom.
Church feels that he can do this by creating artificial Neanderthal DNA based on the genetic code found in bone samples of a 30,000-year old Neanderthal woman, that has been undergoing sequencing by a team of biologists led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany since 2005. From this, they estimated that “1% - 4% of modern Eurasian genomes came from our close hominid relatives.” (http://www.examiner.com/article/neanderthal-genes-made-modern-humans-hea...)
Now that the project is nearly complete, Church is confident that information will let scientists look at the genetic blueprint of humankind's nearest relative, understand its biology and maybe even create a living person. then put this DNA into stem cells," according to an online report posted by the German paper Spiegel.
Although Church did not respond to FoxNews.com requests to confirm the Spiegel Online story, he did tell Bloomberg News that he was keen on the idea last year.
"We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out."
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