In the news in the last few days has been a rash of articles on Dr. George Church of Harvard University, a geneticist and professor of synthetic biology, saying that Dr. Church asserts he can recreate the long extinct Neanderthal version of human by cloning and with the help of an adventurous volunteer woman to be the cloned Neanderthal's surrogate birth mother -- that is, by extracting Neanderthal DNA from Neanderthal bone fossils, placing the DNA inside of stem cells for subsequent injection into cells of an embryo for final placement in the womb of a woman to gestate and carry to birth a baby Neanderthal.
DO IT!
But do ethically and prudently more.
Visit the link from The Raw Story citing the Daily Mail http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/21/ha
Harvard scientist seeks ‘adventurous female’ to give birth to cloned Neanderthal | The Raw Story www.rawstory.com
Professor Church should clone to successful birth at least two generations (crops, so to speak) of Neanderthals, with each generation numbered with at least four individuals, during two different time frames separating each of the two generations, for their sense of biological and social normalcy as well as sense of natural community (phenotypic species identity and community, so to speak) among themselves as they grow up and so they won't have severe psychological problems over their development with their increasing social awareness and natural growth in intelligence and general discernment, while under scientific study, upbringing and management by physically and mentally alien humans. It is unethical to recreate a single specimen of a primate species for human amusement and scrutiny in social and peer isolation from members of its own biological kind and in practical disregard of its inevitably maturing sex "drive" requiring and demanding expression. Male and female chimps raised as individuals in human families, in isolation from other chimps, and as family members of humans, have, when sexually matured, overtly made overtures for sex toward members of their human families, their available sex outlet and have had to be turned over to shelters for problematical, unwanted and dangerous chimps. Captive and pet chimps as individuals and acting together have on occasion viciously attacked, mauled, maimed and killed their human owners or keepers, with chimps being up to seven times stronger than humans.
We should not be surprised if, once the clone-bred Neanderthal individuals are three or four years old or are pubescents, adolescents or adults, they do not resemble humans in their exterior any more than more robust gorillas or diminutive bonobos resemble chimpanzees but are hominids (all hominids are ape-like bipedal primates) with perhaps dense whole-body hair and hairless stubby tails and are a hominid outcome branched and evolved more from or more related to monkeys and apes, though perhaps obscurely and remotely so, than are present-day humans, yet with craniums and brains larger than those of our race or species of hominid or humans, and in technical intelligence and capability comparable to present-day humans. In the instances of successfully cloned mammals, it is the offspring (second generation) of the first generation that tend to be genetically normal and normal in health and that themselves tend to also parent normal offspring. We can expect that, like gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, they do not make reliable nor safe pets.
Neanderthals were hominids structurally in body resembling our version of human but skeletally massively built and with a larger skull and brain case, on the average, though shorter in height, on the average, than our version of human. Scientifically, Neanderthals are biologically classified as humans. Neanderthal made and used fire to cook and for heat at camp sites, made and wore clothes and jewelry, made and used musical wind instruments and small statuary, built huts, made and used wood and stone tools and weapons, and foraged for plant food and hunted animals for meat food and skins for clothing and probably blankets and hut floor covering and hut external covering during prehistoric times, until they totally died out or were exterminated, by disease or violence, or climate change (they were largely a cold-weather adapted and specialized hominid who might not have been able to physically tolerate a change in climate to warm or hot weather or a futile heat-escape migration to the unacceptably hot tropics), or a combination of or all of these, 40,000 to 33,000 years ago, with the invasion of Eurasia, the Middle East and Europe starting circa 60,000 years ago by our version of human from northern Africa. Recent DNA research indicates the miniscule presence of their unique DNA in the populations of Eurasia, the Middle East and Europe, indicating a little interbreeding and hybridization between their and our version (perhaps true races) of human. There is consistent fossil evidence that Neanderthals may have been overly effective hunters, to their stable meat supply detriment and may have engaged in deadly violence against one another tribally -- with their perhaps superior intelligence they may have contributed substantially to their own extinction at an earlier stage of their hominid existence with more primitive weapons.
On rare occasions, individual present-day human babies, male and female, across Europe, Russia and India have been born with a hairless stubby tail, something not observed occurring even among the apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and gibbons). Monkeys characteristically have tails, prehensile in nearly all monkeys except for baboons, which are large ground monkeys that generally have short, hair-covered tails. Hair color among the monkeys, baboons and the orangutan ape varies from black, brown, olive, blond and red-orange. The corneas of the eyes of monkeys and apes are most commonly crystalline in appearance (often light in color and of differing colors across species) and their skin color, of their bare-skin exposed faces, may vary from pale to brown or black or even splotched pale and dark.
