Neanderthal expert weighs in on ancient ancestors

October 13, 2012. Last Tuesday one of the world's leading experts on Neanderthals, Jean-Jacques Hublin, spoke at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The founder and director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Hublin also spoke with Chronicle science writer Eric Berger about the latest research into the closest ancestor of modern humans, who died out about 30,000 years ago.

Q. We've learned a lot about Neanderthals in the last decade, like how some bred with humans, and we've also begun to look at their genetics. How has the field progressed?
A. First of all, it's because of the wealth of material that's been unearthed, both in Europe but also in the Near East and Central Asia and now in Southern Siberia. It's probably now the best documented fossil group of hominins. There are also new techniques now to study fossils. And of course there is genetics. For the first time it is now possible to have the genome for an extinct group of hominins.

Q. What have we learned about the Neanderthals from genetics?
A. Having the sequencing of both the Neanderthal and the Denisovan, who were a closely related sister group to the Neanderthals, gives us not just an understanding of who were the Neanderthals, and what kind of creatures they were, but also an understanding of what the modern humans are. That is because until now it was possible only to compare the genome of humans with chimpanzees that got separated from us 6 or 7 million years ago. So we could only say that all the changes that we saw in the human genome, that changes that differentiated humans from apes, had occurred in the last 6 million years. Now it's possible to know what happened in the last 300,000 or 400,000 years when humans and Neanderthals diverged. This completely changes the picture.

Q. How so?
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