As I wrote in May, there have been some signs that scientists were gearing up to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. Now it’s official, as Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times. [link fixed] I’m particularly intrigued that the paleoanthropologists doing this work are teaming up with a hot little biotech company down the road from me in Branford, Connecticut called 454. They had a paper out recently showing how they can sequence DNA much faster than by conventional methods. Combine classic fossil work with the latest in genome sequencing, and voila…

Update, seconds later: Whoops, forgot to mention that 454 has set up a very nice page on the project, with fact sheets and papers.