| | Biocompare News - Could Interbreeding Between Humans And Neanderthals Have Led To An Enhanced Human Brain? |
 | | The new research, which was published online during the week of November 6, 2006, in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggests that human evolution was not just a matter of spontaneous advantageous mutations arising within the human lineage. |
 | | Human evolution may also have been influenced by interbreeding with other Homo species, which introduced gene variants, known as alleles, that are beneficial to human reproductive fitness, said the study's senior author Bruce T. Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the University of Chicago. |
 | | Lahn said the group's data suggest that the interbreeding was unlikely to be a thorough genetic mixing, but rather a rare - and perhaps even a single — event that introduced the ancestral D allele previously present in this other Homo species into the human line. |
| news.biocompare.com /newsstory.asp?id=158734 (1442 words) |