WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — Our enigmatic, ancient, heavy-browed cousins just got a lot less mysterious. New gene sequencing techniques at a Walnut Creek lab have produced a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome from a bit of a 38,000-year-old leg bone. The ancient DNA is time-worn and fragmented, but a team led by geneticist Eddy Rubin of the Joint Genome Institute managed to salvage 65,000 genetic units and show that more than 99.5 percent of the Neanderthal genome is identical to modern humans. The research appears this week in Science. ‘This provides a whole new window into these long departed ancestors,’ Rubin said. ‘The sequence data will serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get from their bones and the limited number of associated artifacts.’ Though the sequence is just a tiny fraction of the more than 3 billion units that make up the whole genome, it is enough to tell that modern humans and Neanderthals began to split more than 700,000 years ago and evolved into distinct species about 370,000 years ago. There has been a lot of speculation about whether Neanderthals […]