Are you the adventurous type of woman who might want to carry a Neanderthal baby?
There’s a good possibility in the future that scientists may be able to bring Neanderthals back to life using the power of genetics, but in order for that to happen, it’s going to require a human woman to carry the Neanderthal in her womb. So if you think you have the uterine fortitude to carry a fetal hominid that’s several times stronger than a human being, you could be the Eve of the new Neanderthal.
Scientists reconstructed the Neanderthal genome back in 2009, and in that same year an extinct type of ibex was cloned from a frozen skin sample, though it did die immediately after. So it seems possible that a Neanderthal infant could, eventually, be cloned, though it would need a homo sapiens mother to carry and give birth to it.
Writes GenomeWeb:
According to [Der Spiegel,] Church is currently developing technology in his lab that can be used to make human cells similar to those of Neandertals. Eventually, an “adventurous female human” needs to be found as a surrogate mother for the first Neandertal baby, Church is cited as saying, and, from many individuals, “a kind of Neandertal culture” could arise that could gain “political significance.”
Church doesn’t understand “why many people should be so profoundly upset by these kinds of technologies,” since the concept of biological species is currently changing anyway. Up until now, the notion has been that people cannot exchange DNA with other biological species. “But this barrier will fall,” he says.
Notes