When scientists sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010, they learned that Neanderthals interbred with human ancestors before mysteriously going extinct. As a result, many people alive today share up to 4% of their DNA with Neanderthals.
This genetic breakthrough yielded powerful new information about the evolutionary history of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, but it also raised a new question: Could we bring back Neanderthals?
George Church, a Harvard University professor of genetics, answered this question in the affirmative in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2013. Church said that, by chopping the Neanderthal genome up into thousands of chunks and reassembling them in a human stem cell, this “would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone,” which would require an “extremely adventurous female human” to serve as a surrogate.
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