How To Study Neanderthals? Grow Mini Versions Of Their Brains!

Neanderthals died out tens of thousands of years ago, but we still have samples of their DNA. And now we are capable of editing human stem cells and growing our own neanderthals. Well… sort of!

Neanderthal
Source: Flickr.com by Allan Henderson CC BY 2.0

To do this, scientists plan to use brain organoids. Organoids are in lab-grown constructs that are capable of mimicking the behavior or an organ, including the brain, thus allowing the scientists to study it in detail. This is where Svante Pääbo and his team from the Max Planck Insitute in Germany come into play. They decided to grow their own neanderthal mini brains. And then use them to study the mental capabilities of our closest relatives.

Paleontologists often argue about how intelligent Neanderthals were. For a long time, we thought, well, that they were our stupid cousins. The fossils show that might not be true. It seems that Neanderthals painted their bodies, perhaps created cave paintings and probably buried their dead. But fossils have a problem. We can only interpret what exactly they mean. But using brain organoids we could look at the mental capabilities of Neanderthals from a completely new angle.

Pääbo and his team plan to edit sequences of human stem cells to create Neanderthal versions of key genes. Then they will take these edited stem cells and grow brain organoids the size of about a lentil. On these small tissues, they will for the first time ever test if there are any differences between human brains and Neanderthal brains. More specifically they want to see whether there are any basic differences between homo sapiens sapiens and homo neanderthal neurons. They hope to one day found out how, and if, our brains are as exceptional as we think they are.

Sources:

• https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/11/scientists-to-grow-mini-brains-using-neanderthal-dna
• http://www.iflscience.com/brain/scientists-plan-on-growing-mini-neanderthal-brains-in-the-lab/
• http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/neanderthals-may-have-created-europes-oldest-cave-art-some-64000-years-ago/
• http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/neanderthals-confirmed-have-buried-their-dead/

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