Oldest Human Genome Reconstructed

Scientists have reconstructed by far the oldest human genome on record from the femur bone belonging to a 45,000-year-old Siberian man. Dr. Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany received the bone in 2008 from a collector who found it in the Irtysh River in western Siberia. His team carefully extracted DNA from the bone cells in the femur, which led them to discovering it was from a 45,000-year-old man, making the genetic sequence “almost twice as old as the next oldest genome that has been sequenced," he said. The genome has provided new insight into the evolution of humans, including evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred as recently as 50,000 to 60,000 years ago