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Geneticist George Church believes he nearly has all the required things bubbling away in his lab to enable him to clone a Neanderthal, with the only missing link being a woman who’s brave enough to want to carry our alien ancestor.
The problem for the lady involved would be that the Neanderthals had bigger heads than our babies. Even the men reading this should be wincing at the prospect of that. However, current thinking is that Neanderthal babies grew at a quicker rate than ours, so the plus side ought to be fewer months of sleepless nights.
The scientist involved, who would appear to be of the comic book “mad” variety, goes on to suggest that cloned Neanderthal babies could even become a fashion trend, saying: “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.” [Der Spiegel via Human Genome]
Image credit: Cave man from Shutterstock
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Yes, who wouldn’t want to raise a child that’d stand out? Not cruel at all. Can’t help but see contradictions between “normal neanderthal baby”, and “superstrong or supersmart?”.
They definitely weren’t super smart – much smaller brains. If this scientist didn’t even know that (and you can find that out from a quick Google), then I wouldn’t trust him with my fictional womb, let alone my fictional spouse(s) real one.
Wrong!
“Neanderthal cranial capacity is thought to have been as large as that of modern humans, perhaps larger, indicating that their brain size may have been comparable, or larger, as well. In 2008, a group of scientists created a study using three-dimensional computer-assisted reconstructions of Neanderthal infants based on fossils found in Russia and Syria. The study showed Neanderthal and modern human brains were the same size at birth, but by adulthood, the Neanderthal brain was larger than the modern human brain.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
A quick Google would have told you that.
I completely stand corrected! The BBC documentary I watched 10 years ago must just have been wrong
. I’ve always read that they were inferior due to smaller brain sizes, but you learn something new every day!
Interesting article here, if you care; http://news.softpedia.com/news/Neanderthals-were-too-smart-to-survive-15264.shtml
Idiot seeks publicity: Der Spiegel (which is a rag) give it to him, and gizmodo plays along. There is no way that he could get ethics approval for this this, and since there is no money in it, he couldn’t get the funding he needs without ethics approval (no private company would supply it). The chances that the foetus would be viable are tiny in any case (somatic cell cloning using the same species has a big failure rate; add the complication of a different species womb and you’re essentially throwing darts at a target 300 feet away, in a dark room, with your wrong hand, while drunk and expecting to hit the bulls eye).
Also I’m sure its come out recently that DNA only stays usable for a few hundred years, surely that chucks a huge double-helix shaped spanner in the works?
Why is anyone worried? Here is the grown up Neanderthals baby!
http://collider.com/wp-content/uploads/prometheus-makeup-engineer-image.jpg
Wait, we are dooooomeedddd!
NOPE.
99% chance of this abomination being a still bearth. And then what, you’ve just abused your body for nothing.
“Foolish” would be a more apt word than “Adventurous.”
Sounds like a nightmare. But it would be interesting (and also cruel) to watch all the political and social implications if a neanderthal baby ever came to life.
P.S. I am pretty sure my home city football team had a neanderthal player a few years ago:
http://goo.gl/7NzFV
I thought of Roney before clicking, disappointed.
Roney is ugly as hell but I don’t see a neanderthal when I look to his image.
We already have a living, breathing neanderthal. His name is Nikolai Valuev.
if they were superstrong or supersmart, they wouldn’t be extinct