What we are involved in now, in terms of the Neanderthals, is a project where we eventually
want to determine the complete genome sequence of the Neanderthal.
And that, of course, has many complications with it.
One of them is that the Neanderthal is so closely related to us
that, for many, many parts of our genome, we will turn out to be identical to the Neanderthal.
And that makes it very hard, if we have a Neanderthal bone,
to distinguish between the truly endogenous Neanderthal DNA and contaminating DNA
from, say, an archeologist or a museum curator who have handled the bone
or from ourselves in the laboratory.
So what we then do is to look through very many Neanderthal bones that have been found
and try also to get bones that have been recently excavated and not handled a lot by humans.
When they see that they find a bone, they try to extricate it from the matrix,
or from the soil where it is, wearing, actually, gloves and protective clothing,
and freezing it directly, so that it can go into our clean-room
and you can remove one part of the bone for the DNA extraction,
and then go on and clean the rest of the bone as one would normally do
when you find a bone at an excavation.
Because it turns out that a big source of contamination is, for example,
the water that is used to clean the bone when you find it.
So it’s very valuable if one can avoid having the bone cleaned when it’s first found.