Scientists have discovered new characteristics that distinguish modern people from Neanderthals

Skoltech scientists from Germany and the United States and their colleagues analyzed the metabolomes of muscles, kidneys, and three different brain regions of humans, chimpanzees, and macaques

The ancestors of modern humans separated from their close relatives Neanderthals and Denisovans about 600,000 years ago, and the evolutionary divergence between our ancestors and modern chimpanzees can be traced back to 65 million years ago

Researchers at the Skoltech Center for Neurobiology and Brain Recovery (CNBR) led by Professor Philipp Khaitovich, and their colleagues from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Denver in Leipzig, Dresden and Cologne, studied humans and chimpanzees And the metabolic difference of the macaque brain, kidney and muscle

The research director is the famous evolutionary biologist Professor Svante Pöbo, who discovered the Denisovan earlier and led the Neanderthal Genome Project

The team observed an interesting human mutation that caused amino acid substitutions in adenosuccinate lyase, an enzyme involved in purine synthesis in DNA

Unfortunately, although the deciphered human genome is a powerful tool for scientists, it cannot explain all the phenotypic differences between humans

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