Happy Darwin Day

Seems pretty appropriate that on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, scientists have released a sequence of the Neanderthal genome.

Early glimpses of the genome, which was sequenced by Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues, have already cast new light on the ancient human species that went extinct more than 25,000 years ago.

"This will be the first time the entire genome of an extinct organism has been sequenced," Pääbo told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

Now study of the more complete genome will allow scientists to examine Neanderthals' relationship with modern humans as never before.

Chuck D. would be happy, I'd imagine.