Scientists to revive tiny Neanderthal brains for comparison with humans

SCIENTISTS are to bring Neanderthal “miniature brains” to life to see how humans differ from their closest relatives.

The tiny blobs of tissue, around the size of a lentil, will be grown from human stem cells edited to contain Neanderthal DNA, according to reports.

The so-called brain organoids are incapable of thoughts or feelings, but will replicate the basic structures of an adult brain.

Prof Svante Pääbo, the director of genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where the experiments will take place, told The Guardian: “Neanderthals are the closest relatives to everyday humans, so if we should define ourselves as a group or a species, it is really them that we should compare ourselves to.

“We’re seeing if we can find basic differences in how nerve cells function that may be a basis for why humans seem to be cognitively so special.” The lab has been at the forefront of efforts to crack the Neanderthal genome and last year published papers shedding light on just how many traits we owe to our ancestors.

It has already inserted Neanderthal genes for craniofacial development into mice and Neanderthal pain perception genes into frogs’ eggs, to study pain thresholds.

Scientists have made many recent discoveries about Neanderthals. It last year emerged that although they are often portrayed in drawings as being swarthy, they in fact arrived in northern Europe thousands of years before modern humans.

This gave time for their skin to become paler as their bodies struggled to soak up enough sun.

When they interbred with modern humans those pale genes were passed on to the next generation.

Likewise, genetic mutations which predispose people to arthritis also came from our Neanderthal ancestors, as did the propensity to be a night owl rather than a lark, as northern latitudes altered their body clocks. Prof Pääbo’s team first discovered the DNA code of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 using samples taken from females who had lived in Europe tens of thousands of years ago.

Scientists had known that Neanderthals and early humans had interbred, as there is Neanderthal DNA in all nonafrican humans.

But there were reportedly “genetic dead zones” – large stretches of the Neanderthal genome that were not inherited, potentially because they conferred disadvantages to health, fertility, cognition or physical appearance. Prof Pääbo added: “We want to know whether among those things, is there something hiding there that really sets us apart?

“Is there a biological basis for why modern humans went on to become millions and eventually billions of people, spread across the world and have culture?”