Neanderthal Brain Organoids
Scientists will "resurrect" the brain of Neanderthals in the coming months
The world's leading paleogeneticists will create miniature Neanderthal brains in the coming months using stem cells with partially "Neanderthal" DNA, the British newspaper Guardian reports (Scientists to grow 'mini-brains' using Neanderthal DNA).
"We plan to test whether there are some fundamental differences in how Neanderthal and human neurons work. If they exist, then we will be able to uncover the roots of those unique traits of Homo sapiens that helped our ancestors win," said Svante Paabo from the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany).
The "resurrection" and decoding of the Neanderthal genome, conducted by Svante Paabo and his team in 2009, showed that Neanderthals had contact with our ancestors and left about 2-4% of their genes in our DNA. Some of these genes, as further studies have shown, helped Cro-Magnons adapt to life in the north, giving them powerful immunity and other useful traits.
Subsequently, paleogeneticists recovered and deciphered other samples of Neanderthal DNA, which showed that the size of the Homo neanderthalensis population was extremely small. This led many anthropologists to believe that the "aborigines" of Europe could have died out not because of conflicts with Cro-Magnons, but because of degeneration and loss of ability to adapt to new environmental conditions.
In recent years, a number of discoveries have been made, which showed that Neanderthals most likely could speak and were not inferior to Cro-Magnons in the ability to make stone choppers, spears and bone tools, which makes many anthropologists doubt that the first aborigines of Europe died out due to less developed intelligence and social skills.
Paabo and several dozen other leading paleogeneticists plan to test whether this is really the case by creating the world's first Neanderthal brain analogues measuring several centimeters. These organoids, as the scientist noted, will be grown from human stem cells, into whose genome Neanderthal genes responsible for the development of the nervous system will be inserted.
According to him, relatively recently his laboratory has already begun to conduct similar experiments using the embryos of frogs and mice, into whose genomes Paabo and his team inserted genes related to the structure of the skull and pain receptors.
The new experiments will be longer and more ambitious. Growing miniature copies of the brain will take about 9 months, and transplantation of Neanderthal DNA will lead, as scientists hope, to much more serious and complex changes in the work of nerve cells and how they form connections with each other.
"Our dream is to find hints that human cells can form longer or more "branched" networks of synapses. In this case, we will be able to say for sure that we have managed to find the reason why our brain works completely differently," Paabo continues.
As Paabo added, he personally does not believe that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were at the same level of intelligence development. In his opinion, their tools and art were more crude than those of our ancestors, and ancient people did not try to cross the ocean, as the first Homo sapiens did 100 thousand years ago.
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