How a single gene alteration may have separated modern humans from predecessors: Novel study used brain organoids genetically modified to mimic now-extinct Neanderthals – Science Daily

As a professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, has long studied how the brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological disorders. For almost as long, he has also been curious about the evolution of the human brain — what changed that makes us so different from preceding Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest evolutionary relatives, now extinct?Evolutionary studies rely heavily on two tools…

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