Neanderthal Man (14 page)

In March 2000, while Matthias was working on this, a paper that appeared in
Nature
took us by surprise. A group based in the UK had sequenced mtDNA from another Neanderthal, unearthed at Mezmaiskaya Cave in the northern Caucasus.
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They had not applied all the technical approaches we advocated to make sure that the sequence was correct; for example, they had not cloned the PCR products. Nevertheless, the DNA  sequence they found was almost identical to our type-specimen sequence from Neander Valley. Matthias, who had his sequences almost finished, was disappointed that he’d been beaten to the publication of the world’s second Neanderthal mtDNA sequences—especially since his progress had been slow due to all the precautions and checks on which I insisted. I sympathized with him, but I was also happy that our pioneer sequence from Neander Valley had been verified by a group working independently of us. Yet I did not quite agree with the commentary
Nature
published along with the paper, which said that this second Neanderthal sequence was “more important” than the first because it showed that the first was correct. I wrote that off as sour grapes on
Nature
’s part for not getting to publish the first Neanderthal sequence.

There was a consolation prize of sorts for Matthias. The second Neanderthal DNA not only served to confirm the results in our 1997
Cell
paper, but now that we knew three sequences, including the one Matthias had determined from Vindija, it became possible to say something, albeit something tentative, about genetic variation among Neanderthals. Genetic theory holds that with just three sequences there is a 50 percent chance of sampling the deepest branch of a tree relating all the mitochondrial DNAs in a population. It turned out that 3.7 percent of the nucleotides in the segment that Matthias and the British group had sequenced differed among the three Neanderthals. For perspective, we wanted to compare this degree of variation to the variation in humans and the great apes. First, we used sequence data for the same segment determined by many other groups from 5,530 humans from all over the world. In order to make a fair comparison to the three Neanderthals, we sampled three randomly chosen humans many times, so that we could calculate an average of how many differences three humans carry in the same sequence. It was 3.4 percent, very similar to that for the three Neanderthals. There were 359 chimpanzee sequences available for the same mtDNA segment. When we sampled chimpanzees in the same way, they differed by an average of 14.8 percent, and for twenty-eight gorillas the corresponding value was 18.6 percent. So Neanderthals seemed to be different from the great apes in having little mtDNA variation, just like present-day humans. Obviously, it was risky to speculate from just three individuals, and from just mtDNA, so when we published these data later in 2000, in
Nature Genetics,
we stressed that it would be desirable to analyze more Neanderthals; nevertheless, we suggested that Neanderthals were probably similar to modern humans in having little genetic variation and that they had therefore expanded from a small population, just like us.
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Life is not an orderly thing. One morning, not long before our publication of the first Neanderthal mtDNA sequences in 1997, my secretary told me that an elderly professor had phoned asking for an appointment with me. He had told her that he wanted to discuss some plans for the future. I had no idea who he was but vaguely supposed he was a retired professor who wanted to share his crackpot ideas about human evolution with me. I was very wrong. What he had to say was very exciting.

He explained to me that he came on behalf of the Max Planck Society, or MPS for short, which supports basic research in Germany. Among its many efforts, the MPS had a program to build up world-class research in the former East Germany, which had been fused with West Germany seven years earlier. One guiding principle was to found new research institutes focusing on topics in which Germany was scientifically weak. An area of particular weakness was anthropology, and for a very good reason.

As do many contemporary German institutions, the MPS had a predecessor before the war. Its name was the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and it was founded in 1911. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society had built up and supported institutes around eminent scientists such as Otto Hahn, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, scientific giants active at a time when Germany was a scientifically dominant nation. That era came to an abrupt end when Hitler rose to power and the Nazis ousted many of the best scientists because they were Jewish. Although formally independent of the government, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society became part of the German war machine—doing, for example, weapons research. This was not surprising. Even worse was that through its Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was actively involved in racial science and the crimes that grew out of that. In that institute, based in Berlin, people like Josef Mengele were scientific assistants while performing experiments on inmates at Auschwitz death camp, many  of them children. Whereas Mengele was sentenced for his crimes after the war (although he had escaped to South America), his superiors at the Institute for Anthropology were never charged. On the contrary, some of them became professors at universities.

When the Max Planck Society was formed in 1946 as the successor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, anthropology was understandably a subject best avoided. In fact, as a result of what happened under Nazi rule, the entire field of anthropology had lost its status in Germany. It failed to attract funding, good students, and innovative researchers. Obviously, this was an area where Germany was scientifically weak, and my visitor said that the MPS had set up a committee to consider whether anthropology could be an area in which the MPS should found a new institute. He also indicated that there were different opinions as to whether this was a good idea given recent German history. Nevertheless, my visitor asked me if I would consider moving to such an institute should it be created. I was vaguely aware that the MPS commanded great resources, and that these resources had been augmented to build several new institutes in the east after reunification of the two German states. I was intrigued by the prospect of helping build a new institution, but I did not want to sound overenthusiastic and have them believe I would come under any circumstances. With this in mind I said that I would consider it if it meant that I would be able to influence how such an institute would be organized and function. The professor assured me that as a founding director I would have great freedom and influence. He suggested I come and present to the committee my views on how such an institute might be organized.

Some time later I received an invitation to hold a presentation in front of the committee. It would meet in Heidelberg and was made up of several foreign experts, headed by Sir Walter Bodmer, a human geneticist from Oxford and a specialist on the immune system. I presented those aspects of our work that I thought might be appropriate to an anthropology institute, focusing on the study of ancient DNA, especially Neanderthals, and the reconstruction of human history from genetic as well as linguistic relationships between human populations. In addition to my scientific presentation there were several informal discussions about whether anthropology was a topic that the MPS should engage in, given the dire history of the subject in Germany. Perhaps it was easier for me as a non-German born well after the war to have a relaxed attitude toward this. I felt that more than fifty years after the war, Germany could not allow itself to be inhibited in its scientific endeavors by its past crimes. We should neither forget  history nor fail to learn from it, but we should also not be afraid to go forward. I think I even said that fifty years after his death, Hitler should not be allowed to dictate what we could or could not do. I stressed that in my opinion any new institute devoted to anthropology should not be a place where one philosophized about human history. It should do empirical science. Scientists who were to work there should collect real hard facts about human history and test their ideas against them.

I did not know how well my arguments went down with the committee. I returned to Munich and months went by, until I had almost forgotten about the whole thing. Then one day I received an invitation to meet with a new MPS committee that had been charged with actually founding an institute devoted to anthropology. There followed a number of meetings with talks by different candidates. The fact that there were no traditions in the subject to build on either in the MPS or indeed in Germany turned out to be somewhat advantageous. It allowed us to discuss freely, unconstrained by academic traditions and preexisting structures, how one would organize a modern institute to study human history. The concept that emerged during our discussions was that of an institute not structured along the lines of academic disciplines but focused on a question: What makes humans unique? It would be an interdisciplinary institute where paleontologists, linguists, primatologists, psychologists, and geneticists would together work on this question. The framework within which one should ask this question was evolution. Ultimately, the goals should be to understand what had set humans on an evolutionary track so different from other primates. So it should be an institute in “evolutionary anthropology.”

Neanderthals as the closest extinct relative of modern humans would of course fit well with this concept. So would the study of our closest living relatives, the great apes. And so it came to be that the renowned American psychologist Mike Tomasello, who works with both humans and apes, was invited to start a department in the institute, as was Christophe Boesch, a Swiss primatologist who with his wife Hedwige had spent many years living in the forest in the Ivory Coast to study wild chimpanzees. A comparative linguist, Bernard Comrie, who is British but worked in the United States for several years, was also invited to join the institute. I was very impressed not only by the quality of the people chosen but by the fact that they all came from outside Germany. I, who had lived in Germany for a mere seven years, was the most “German” of the people entrusted with starting this institute. In few European countries could one be so little  impeded by chauvinistic prejudice that a huge research institute—which eventually would employ more than four hundred people—would be led entirely by people from outside the country.

During one of the first meetings in Munich at which all prospective directors of departments were present, I suggested that the four of us get out of town to relax and be alone among ourselves. So in the evening we crammed into my small car and drove to Tegernsee in the Bavarian Alps. As the sun was setting we hiked up Hirschberg, a mountain I had often walked and jogged up with friends and students. Most of us were in shoes not at all suited for the endeavor. As the sun set, we realized we would not reach the summit. We paused on a little hill and enjoyed the pristine Alpine landscape. I felt that we were truly connected to one another and that this was a time when people would tend to be truthful. I asked if they were truly going to come to Germany and start the institute, or if they were negotiating with the MPS only in order to try to extort resources from their current institutions in exchange for not leaving, a behavior not uncommon among successful academics. They all said that they would come. Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountaintops, we walked down under tall trees as night was falling. We talked excitedly about the new institute and what we might do there. We all had solidly empirical research programs, we were interested not only in what we did ourselves but in what the others did, and we were all about the same age. I realized that this new institute would happen, and that I would likely be happy there.

There were still many things to work out with the Max Planck Society and among ourselves. A major question was where in the former East Germany the new institute would be located. The MPS had a clear idea. It was to be in Rostock, a small Hanseatic harbor city on the Baltic coast—and the society had a compelling reason. Germany is a federal country composed of sixteen states. Each state pays into the MPS according to the size of its economy. So politicians obviously want as many institutes as possible located in their home states so that they “get their money’s worth.” The state where Rostock is located, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, was the only one without a Max Planck Institute, so it obviously had a good reason to demand one. I could sympathize but I felt that our mission was to ensure that the new institute was scientifically successful, not that some political balance among states was upheld. With just about two hundred thousand inhabitants, Rostock was small, had no international airport, and was almost completely unknown outside Germany. I felt it would be hard to attract good people there. I wanted the new institute to be in Berlin. This, I  quickly realized, was not going to happen. A huge number of federal institutions had moved there from the former West Germany. To add our institute to the list would be politically impossible and even difficult in practical terms.

The MPS continued to push for Rostock and arranged a visit to the city, where the mayor and his associates would explain the advantages of the place and show us around. I was firmly against Rostock and told the MPS that not only would I not participate in the visit but would be happy to continue to work at the university in Munich. Up to that point, I believed the MPS officials had thought that I was just playing tricks with them when I said I would not move to Rostock. Now, they realized that I would indeed not come if the institute was in Rostock.

Discussion about possible alternative locations followed. To me, two cities in the southern state of Saxony, Leipzig and Dresden, seemed to have good future prospects. They were both fairly large and had a long-standing industrial tradition as well as a state government that was keen on connecting to that tradition. In addition, another Max Planck Institute was being planned for Saxony—one organized by the brilliant Finnish-born cell biologist Kai Simons. I had met him a few times as a graduate student back in the days when I worked on how cells deal with viral proteins, and I was sure that it would become a great institute. My dream was to have the two institutes next to each other to create a campus where synergies between our group and their institute would be possible. Unfortunately, Germany’s federal structure thwarted this vision. It was hard enough to argue that the two largest new institutes to be started in East Germany, ours and Kai’s, should both be located in the state of Saxony; that they would also be in the same city was totally impossible to imagine. Since Kai and his colleagues were ahead of us in their planning and had already settled on Dresden, we looked at Leipzig. By and large we liked what we saw.