A plea to lose the race

The 51st meeting of Australian geneticists is hardly the place to go looking for Neanderthals.

But American scientist Alan Templeton likes to tease his Australian colleagues by suggesting that's just what some of them look like.

Courtesy of theage.com.au

Alan Templeton studies how humanity has evolved, and how we live now.

"Many of you are not anatomically modern; you can look around and make a guess at who is not," he told his colleagues at the conference this week.

The physical features of a primitive human being - the sloping forehead and the heavy brow - can be found everywhere in the 20th century.

That's true even among this seriously clever gathering of scientists at Melbourne University, according to Templeton, a professor of biology from Washington University in St Louis.

The taunt about Neanderthals reflects the fruits of the 57-year-old's career as an evolutionary biologist.

He has combined a PhD in genetics with a masters in statistics in order to analyse the characteristics of the DNA of people, plants and animals from all over the world.

He looks at the very minute in order to talk about the stuff of life on the grandest scale - the mass migration of humanity and biodiversity in ecological hotspots.

There is an astonishing array of contemporary applications for his analytical programs that include the study of heart disease and the preservation of the salamander lizard in Galilee.

When it comes to looking at genes to decide how humans evolved, complex maths is needed to analyse the DNA of up to 60 groups of people at a time. Each group can contain up to 1000 people, and Templeton looks at as many as 10 regions of the human genome that contains around 40,000 genes.

His conclusion? We're all the same. And not only are we all the same, we've got lots of similar characteristics to our forebears of 1.7 million years ago.

He hopes his work will put to bed once and for all the idea that there's a scientific basis for racism.

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•	A plea to lose the race The Age (AUS), Thursday, July 15, 2004 Byline: Catharine Munro

•	New twist on out-of-Africa theory ABC Science Online (AUS), Wednesday, July 14, 2004 Byline: Judy Skatssoon