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Charlemagne Allen · 11-26-2008, 04:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raindrop Drinkwater

Yes, I've been wondering about that overnight.

What would be the point in recreating Neanderthals? What would we learn from them, exactly? Is it really worth recreating an ancient lifeform just to check what colour were their eyes?

I had an idea for a book once. It would involved a theme park where people cloned dinosaurs, and there was a power outage and things got out of control. I thought it might be fun if I threw some really cool small lizards such as raptors in the park. Wouldn't that be a great idea?

Seriously, any ancient being we cloned would not be proof of an example of ancient specimen, since genes express in very quirky ways They've found with certain GM potatoes that if you insert the same genes into several potates, it will not express in the exact same way, and potatoes are slightly less complex than ancient primates.

A person trying to clone a Neanderthal would probably start by grinding a ton of fossilized femur bones in the hope that they contain a full strand of DNA hasn't been messed up in a few million years. That would be a tall order in itself. After that, they would likely end up taking an egg from a woman (highly unethical--- the Korean guy who made the false claims of human cloning was chastised for taking egg samples from his lab assistant), and then implanting the complete strand of DNA in the egg. Then you would have the fertilized egg of a test tube baby Neanderthal. I'm not quite sure what you do after that point: implant it in a human female? use an artifical womb? It wouldn't be easy thing to do at all.....