• Complain

Svante Pääbo - Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

Here you can read online Svante Pääbo - Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2014, publisher: Basic Books, genre: Science. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Svante Pääbo Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
  • Book:
    Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Basic Books
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2014
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

An Amazon.com Best of the Month in Nonfiction for February 2014
What can we learn from the genomes of our closest evolutionary relatives?
Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbos mission to answer this question, and recounts his ultimately successful efforts to genetically define what makes us different from our Neanderthal cousins. Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA.
We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominin relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Drawing on genetic and fossil clues, Pbo explores what is known about the origin of modern humans and their relationship to the Neanderthals and describes the fierce debate surrounding the nature of the two species interactions. His findings have not only redrawn our family tree, but recast the fundamentals of human historythe biological beginnings of fully modern Homo sapiens, the direct ancestors of all people alive today.
A riveting story about a visionary researcher and the nature of scientific inquiry, Neanderthal Man offers rich insight into the fundamental question of who we are.

Svante Pääbo: author's other books


Who wrote Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Advance praise for Neanderthal Man It is a rare thing to read about an - photo 1

Advance praise for Neanderthal Man It is a rare thing to read about an - photo 2

Advance praise for
Neanderthal Man

It is a rare thing to read about an important development in science by its principal innovator, written in the spirit and style in which the research unfolded. Neanderthal Man is a dispatch from the front, and if you want to learn how real science is really done, I suggest you read it.

EDWARD O. WILSON ,
University Research Professor, Emeritus, Har VARD UNIVERSITY

Problem by problem, solution by solution, Pbos gripping account of the discovery of our relationship with Neanderthals brilliantly conveys the thrill and reality of todays big science and the excitement of a major breakthrough.

RICHARD WRANGHAM
Professor of Biological Anthropology, Harvard University, and
author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Svante Pbos Neanderthal Man is the incredible personal story of one mans quest for our human origins using the latest genome sequence tools. Pbo takes us through his exciting journey to first extract DNA from ancient bones then sequence it to give us the first real glance at our human ancestors, and ultimately shows that early humans and Neanderthals interbred to produce modern humans. This is science at its best and reinforces that contained in each of our genomes is the history of humanity.

J. CRAIG VENTER,
Chairman and President, J. Craig Venter Institute

Copyright 2014 by Svante Pbo

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107-1307.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail .

Designed by Jack Lenzo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pbo, Svante.

Neanderthal man : in search of lost genomes / Svante Paabo.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-08068-7 (e-book) 1. Neanderthals. 2. Human population genetics. 3. Genome analysis. I. Title.

GN285.P33 2014

569.986--dc23

2013041877

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Linda, Rune, and Freja

Contents

_______________

Preface

_____________

The idea to write this book was first suggested to me by John Brockman. Without his initiative and encouragement, I would never have taken the time to write a manuscript much longer than the short scientific articles I am used to authoring. Once I got started, however, I enjoyed the process. Thank you for making this happen!

Many people have helped me by reading the text and suggesting improvements. First of all I thank my wife, Linda Vigilant, who in addition was always supportive of the endeavor, even if it meant me being away from the family. Sarah Lippincot, Carol Rowney, Christine Arden, and, above all, Tom Kelleher at Basic Books were excellent editors. I hope I have learned from them. Carl Hannestad, Kerstin Lexander, Viola Mittag, and others read parts or all of the text and gave helpful suggestions. Souken Danjo provided hospitality in Saikouji for some of the time I needed to withdraw from the world.

I recount events as I remember them. But I suspect that I may have mixed up or conflated a few specifics here and therefor example, regarding various meetings in and trips to Berlin, to 454 Life Sciences, and so on. Obviously, too, I recount events from my own subjective perspective, trying to give credit (and its opposite) where in my opinion it is due. I am aware that this perspective is not the only way one can view such events. In order not to burden the text with too many names and details, I have refrained from mentioning many persons who were nevertheless important. I apologize to everyone who feels unduly ignored!

Chapter 1
Neanderthal ex Machina

__________________________________

Late one night in 1996, just as I had dozed off in bed, my phone rang. The caller was Matthias Krings, a graduate student in my laboratory at the Zoological Institute of the University of Munich. All he said was, Its not human.

Im coming, I mumbled, threw on some clothes, and drove across town to the lab. That afternoon, Matthias had started our DNA sequencing machines, feeding them fragments of DNA he had extracted and amplified from a small piece of a Neanderthal arm bone held at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn. Years of mostly disappointing results had taught me to keep my expectation low. In all probability, whatever we had extracted was bacterial or human DNA that had infiltrated the bone sometime in the 140 years since it had been unearthed. But on the phone, Matthias had sounded excited. Could he have retrieved genetic material from a Neanderthal? It seemed too much to hope for.

In the lab, I found Matthias along with Ralf Schmitz, a young archaeologist who had helped us get permission to remove the small section of arm bone from the Neanderthal fossil stored in Bonn. They could hardly control their delight as they showed me the string of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts coming out of one of the sequencers. Neither they nor I had ever seen anything like it before.

What to the uninitiated may seem a random sequence of four letters is in fact shorthand for the chemical structure of DNA, the genetic material stored in almost every cell in the body. The two strands of the famous double helix of DNA are made up of units containing the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, abbreviated A, T, G, and C. The order in which these nucleotides occur makes up the genetic information necessary to form our body and support its functions. The particular piece of DNA we were looking at was part of the mitochondrial genomemtDNA, for shortthat is transmitted in the egg cells of all mothers to their children. Several hundred copies of it are stored in the mitochondria, tiny structures in the cells, and it specifies information necessary for these structures to fulfill their function of producing energy. Each of us carries only one type of mtDNA, which comprises a mere 0.0005 percent of our genome. Since we carry in each cell many thousands of copies of just the one type, it is particularly easy to study, unlike the rest of our DNAa mere two copies of which are stored in the cell nucleus, one from our mother and one from our father. By 1996, mtDNA sequences had been studied in thousands of humans from around the world. These sequences would typically be compared to the first determined human mtDNA sequence, and this common reference sequence, in turn, could be used to compile a list of which differences were seen at which positions. What excited us was that the sequence we had determined from the Neanderthal bone contained changes that had not been seen in any of those thousands of humans. I could hardly believe that what we were looking at was real.

As I always am when faced with an exciting or unexpected result, I was soon plagued by doubts. I looked for any possibility that what we saw could be wrong. Perhaps someone had used glue produced from cow hide to treat the bones at some point, and we were seeing mtDNA from a cow. No: we immediately checked cow mtDNA (which others had already sequenced) and found that it was very different. This new mtDNA sequence was clearly close to the human sequences, yet it was slightly different from all of them. I began to believe that this was, indeed, the first piece of DNA ever extracted and sequenced from an extinct form of human.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes»

Look at similar books to Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes»

Discussion, reviews of the book Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.