Turns Out, Early Humans Not the Cause of Woolly Rhinoceros Extinction By Kevin E. Noonan — Paleogenomics (the use of genetic analysis of DNA contained in ancient remains) has developed rapidly since Svante Pääbo first showed that DNA could be extracted in sufficient quantity and of sufficient quality to be useful in making evolutionary comparisons between, inter alia, modern Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalis. See Krings, Stone, Schmitz, Krainitzki, Stoneking, and Pääbo, “Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans,” Cell. 90(1): 19–30 (1997). Since then, ancient DNA (both genomic, gDNA, and mitochondrial, mtDNA) have been used…
