New and Exciting in PLoS Community Journals - Neanderthals

As always on Fridays, there are new articles published in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. Look around to see what's new. My pick for this week:

Inconsistencies in Neanderthal Genomic DNA Sequences:

One of the enduring questions in human evolution is the relationship of fossil groups, such as Neanderthals, with people alive today. Were Neanderthals direct ancestors of contemporary humans or an evolutionary side branch that eventually died out? Two recent papers describing the sequencing of Neanderthal nuclear DNA from fossil bone held promise for finally answering this question. However, the two studies came to very different conclusions regarding the ancestral role of Neanderthals. In this paper, we reanalyzed the data from the two original studies. We found that the two studies are inconsistent with each other, which implies that the data from at least one of the studies is probably incorrect. The likely culprit is contamination with modern human DNA, which we believe compromised the findings of one of the original Neanderthal DNA studies.