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‘Adventurous’ Woman Needed as Surrogate for Neanderthal Baby (Gawker)
more, including links to MIT and Der Spiegel at the link aboveAre you an adventurous human woman? Adventurous enough to be a surrogate mother for the first Neanderthal baby to be born in 30,000 years?
Harvard geneticist George Church recently told Der Spiegel he's close to developing the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal, at which point all he'd need is an "adventurous human woman" — einen abenteuerlustigen weiblichen Menschen — to act as a surrogate mother.
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What would that entail? According to a 2008 study of a Neanderthal infant skeleton "the head of the Neanderthal newborn was somewhat longer than that of a human newborn because of its relatively robust face," and Neanderthal women generally had a wider birth canal than human women.
Neanderthal birth was simpler than human birth, because Neanderthal infants didn't have to rotate to get to the birth canal, but otherwise the processes were very similar.
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Church seems to think that there'll be a Neanderthal craze, as he told Bloomberg Businessweek last year:
"Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out."