Dark matter
In the latest episode of Dark Matter, José Manuel Nieves talks about the genetic change that could have given modern humans a decisive advantage over their contemporaries
The change of a single amino acid in a single protein, TKTL1, could have given modern humans a decisive advantage over their contemporaries, the Neanderthals, by allowing the formation of a greater number of neurons in the cerebral neocortex. That is the extraordinary conclusion reached by a large international team of researchers, led by Anneline Pinson of the Max Planck Institute Molecular Cellular Biology and Genetics, and in which they have collaborated, among others, Svante Paäbo, who in 2010, together with his team, succeeded in sequencing for the first time the genome of a neanderthal.
According to the researchers, this little genetic change it decisively contributed to the cognitive differences between the first humans of our species and other human variants that ended up becoming extinct. The study is published today in the journal ‘Science’.
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