‘Caveman’ genes lightly laced in modern humans, professor says

For millennia, the hanky-panky between the ice sheets among the kissing cousins of prehistory was hush-hush.

Then Ed Green and his colleagues peeked into the gene pool and found proof that modern humans, or Cro Magnons, did get up close and personal with the Neanderthals, but that it must have happened well before they were hooking up in Ice Age Europe.

Now we know that many of us walk around with genes lightly laced — only 1 to 4 percent — with what a nonscientist might call “caveman DNA.”

Thursday night at the Linda Hall Library, Green told a full house about the Neanderthal Genome Project, which issued its first findings in two years.

Green is an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In the third in the lecture series, called “Blade and Bone: The Discovery of Human Antiquity,” he told of updated sampling that finds the DNA widely spread, from Siberian natives to Australian Aborigines to Native Americans.
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