Divine Variations by Keel Terence

Author:Keel, Terence [Keel, Terence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

NOAH’S MONGREL CHILDREN

Ancient DNA and the Persistence of Christian Forms in Modern Biology

ON JUNE 2, 1857, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a gymnasium teacher in Elberfeld, Germany, and Hermann Schaaffhausen, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, presented to the Natural History Society of Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia what appeared to be the remains of an ancient human race.1 The fossils, which included about half of the bone structure of a complete body, were found by accident the year before by workers at the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. On the day of their fortuitous discovery, September 4, 1856, canyon workers had presented the remains to Fuhlrott, assuming they belonged to an ancient cave bear—an increasingly common find by quarry workers in Germany and other parts of Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Fuhlrott, an amateur but well-known fossil collector, saw that the prominent brow ridges and narrow skullcap were too humanlike to belong to an ancient animal. This was true even though the thickness and weight of this creature’s massive femur bones were unlike any he had seen in modern humans. With a humanlike bone structure whose antiquity appeared obvious given the extent of mineralization that had collected on the fossils and the depth at which the remains were found, Fuhlrott concluded that the quarry workers had actually discovered the remains of an ancient human type. Word of Fuhlrott’s discovery spread quickly to Hermann Schaaffhausen. Eventually the two met, and Schaaffhausen corroborated Fuhlrott’s claim that an ancestral human had been discovered in the Neander Valley. Their collaborative presentation of the world’s first “Neanderthal” in June 1857 prompted a furious debate across Europe and America about the origins of modern humans and the biological links that humans might have with ancestral hominids buried deep below the earth’s surface.

In May 2010, almost a century and a half later, the Neanderthal Genome Project (NGP) announced a discovery that shed new light on human ties to our hominid ancestors, the Neanderthals. Hidden within the six billion base pairs that make up the modern human genome, the NGP identified potential regions within “the human genome reference sequence” (a collection of all known human genes covering 99 percent of the human genome) where Neanderthals and humans are thought to have mixed through interbreeding.2 To corroborate their theory, modern scientists have compared Neanderthal DNA with human DNA from six individuals who in most people’s minds represent continental racial types: two individuals from China, one from France, one from Papua New Guinea, one from South Africa, and one from West Africa. Their conclusions were rendered in broad, sweeping terms; the project discovered that Asians and Europeans were more genetically similar to the Neanderthal than Africans were, with an estimated 1–4 percent of their genome containing Neanderthal DNA.3 Thus, some 150 years after Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen’s discovery, scientists now claim to have verified the actual biological links between humans and Neanderthals. Although all contemporary humans did not equally share the genetic legacy of the

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