Neanderthal Genome Project Raises Surreal

Question: What If We Can Resurrect Lost

Human Cousins?
Studies of the Neanderthals right up to fairly recent times overwhelmingly portrayed
these hominins as extremely primitive cavemen little more developed than apes.
Indeed, one of the names earlier proposed for these people was Homo Stupidus,
Aroon Raman

Around 200,000 years ago, there appeared on Earth a class of proto-humans. Descended
from even more primitive humanoid ancestors, they spread out (very thinly) over an
enormous land mass; occupying what is modern day Europe from Spain in the west to
as far as the Ural Mountains in the east.

Bones of these people first started to be discovered in the mid-19 thcentury and have
continued to surface periodically right up to the present day. Systematic paleo-biological
analysis of these finds has placed them as belonging to a separate species of humans
Homo Neanderthalensis.

Studies of the Neanderthals right up to fairly recent times overwhelmingly portrayed

these hominins as extremely primitive cavemen little more developed than apes.
Indeed, one of the names earlier proposed for these people was Homo Stupidus, and the
term Neanderthal is used pejoratively even today for anyone exhibiting abnormally
brutish or coarse behaviour.

However, over a period of 100,000 years or so, these beings developed slowly but
surely; adapting to their environment and gaining increasing mastery over it. Recent
finds combined with more sophisticated modes of analysis have allowed us to form a
more complete understanding of the Neanderthal and the picture that emerges is that of
a truly remarkable human.

The Neanderthal man crafted tools, hunted in complex social groups, and appear to
have likely had a language (of which practically nothing is known). Their diet appears
to have been well balanced, and most amazingly, they made ornaments, buried their
dead, and possibly even invented a water craft in which they sailed the seas. In short, far
from the brutish ape-man of popular lore, the Neanderthal was a stones throw from
being fully human.

This is not surprising given that the size of the Neanderthal brain matched that of the
average modern human (Homo Sapiens). Subsequent mapping of Neanderthal DNA
recovered from their bone fragments indicate that they shared 99.7% of the Sapiens
genetic sequence.

V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain Cognition, University of

California, San Diego, and one the worlds leading neurologists, says that such
hominins (he was speaking of another similar human species) challenge all our
preconceived notions of what it means to be human. Were the Neanderthals self aware?
Did they have a moral sense? Were they aware of their mortality?

Sadly, we may never know the answers to these profound questions, for, around around
40,000 years ago, these alternate human species vanished from the face of the earth.
Several reasons have been advanced for their extinction, including climate change for
which the Neanderthals were ill-prepared. Even if climate shifts played a part, it seems
very likely that the main cause was the arrival of us Homo Sapiens into their world.
Sapiens superior social networks, hunting and resource gathering techniques, including
the domestication and use of wild dogs in the hunting of prey, placed increasing
pressure on the Neanderthals and tipped them over into extinction.

The fate of these hominins raises overarching questions about what we Sapiens have
done to other species in our inexorable march across the Earths landscape. Sapiens
arrived in Europe from Africa and also fanned out towards Asia around 45,000 years
ago. So, in a relatively short blip of 5,000 years (when we consider that Neanderthals
had lived in Europe for 200,000 years) we had wiped out our human cousins.

But in a weird inversion to this tale of unremitting Earth conquest, scientists are now
contemplating an astonishing possibility: resurrecting the Neanderthal. Even a decade
ago, such a prospect would have rested squarely within the realm of science fiction,
laced with such sci-fi staples as time travel and discovery of a lost race. But in 2013 a
multi-disciplinary, multi-country team of scientists led Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany managed to map the entire genome of an
130,000 year Neanderthal from a single toe bone discovered in a Siberian cave.
Described as an amazing technical accomplishment, the Neanderthal genome has
become a genetic encyclopaedia offering fresh insights into the life and times of this
species. One of the insights to emerge is that early humans very likely interbred with
Neanderthals, suggesting cultural similarities that invert many of our notions of
superiority over these early humans.

The Neanderthal Genome Project also has raised a deeper and altogether surreal
question: What if we can bring the Neanderthal back?

As Harvard professor Frank Church one of the worlds leading synthetic biologists
said in a 2016 interview:

The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has
actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000
chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a
human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line
that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We
developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we
assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create
a Neanderthal clone.

Then, using an extremely adventurous female human as a surrogate mother, the

reconstructed Neanderthal DNA would be introduced into a Sapiens ovum, thus
producing the first Neanderthal child in 30,000 years.

But why would we wish to resurrect a long extinct human? Many scientific reasons of
questionable validity abound. Church himself believes that bringing back the
Neanderthals would add to the social and cultural diversity of mankind that he believes
necessary for any species survival. It is also possible the Neanderthals brain structure
and alternative ways of thinking may provide us with fresh solutions to problems that
seem endemic to modern societies. But the most inventive one advanced by several
scientists is the ethical argument: since we were responsible for their extinction we
have a duty to bring them back!

The Neanderthal project is only a small subset of the surreal set of choices that the
astonishing technological advances in genetics, physics, self-learning computers and the
like are placing before mankind. Choices for which we have no clear compass. As Yuval
Noah Harari says in his influential book, Sapiens:
 We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea of what to do with all
that power. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are
accountable to no one.

The fate of the Neanderthals, however, could hold out some profound lessons for us as
we contemplate our future. In one sense, the very weapon superior intelligence that
that was so potent against them is perhaps taking us closer to their fate than we realize.

We already have artificial intelligence (AI) systems that far outperform humans in
several areas requiring deep learning such as chess, bridge or Go. A recent survey of the
worlds foremost AI experts assigned a 90% probability to the development of a
superintelligent being could come into existence so, within this century.

We use the word being advisedly for in one version at least, such an entity would
possess the neural network of a human brain, but endowed with a will and cognitive
power far beyond the reach of any human. In other words, the gap between it and us
will likely be far greater than between us and the Neanderthals.

As the physicist Stephen Hawking warns: The real risk with AI isn't malice but
competence. A super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals,
and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble.

Given the record of Sapiens on earth, it may well be that the Neanderthals will have the
last laugh.

(Aroon Raman is a Research and Innovation entrepreneur and the author of the national
bestsellers The Shadow Throne and The Treasure of Kafur. His latest thriller, Skyfire, has been
nominated as one of Amazons must-read picks of 2016. He can be reached
at www.aroonraman.com)