Santa Cruz is a
great place to do very ambitious and
crazy science.
One of the projects that I've been involved
with is
sequencing and analyzing the genome of the Neanderthal.
Having this Neanderthal genome
sequence has been
enormously illuminating for
understanding what
has happened in recent human
evolutionary time since we diverged from
the Neanderthal. In a way that's
analogous to sequencing the chimpanzee
to understand what happened in human
evolution in the last six million years,
having the Neanderthal genome sequence allows us to see
in great detail what has happened
in the last three hundred thousand years or so
--a time that is incredibly
interesting
in human evolution, when we became
fully behaviorally and anatomically modern humans
and dispersed out of Africa and
colonized every part of the globe and
started painting on the walls of caves and
writing poetry and filming one
another and looking at these videos all the time.
All of this stuff is really recent human development,
and to the extent that any of this is a
a function of recent cognitive development, we have the chance now to go in
and put our finger on the genetic changes
that underlie that.
