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History is written is by the victors, so it is not surprising that Cro-Magnon man, the ancestor of us all, is celebrated, while Neanderthals are relegated to the dust bin of evolution as a brutish and failed experiment. However, Neanderthals had large brains and a sophisticated stone tool technology, and they enjoyed a good run (approximately, from 250,000 to 26,000 BCE). They may also have had red hair and pale skin.
Researchers examining DNA extracted from the bones of two Neanderthal skeletons (no attempt was made to obtain informed consent from relatives of the subjects) found a variant of the melanocortin 1 receptor gene (MC1R) that is not present in modern humans. To test the effect of th…