Wanted: 'Adventurous' Woman to Birth Neanderthal

A Harvard professor has hatched a plan to bring back the Neanderthals—but he needs an "adventurous" female volunteer to deliver a knuckle-dragging bundle of joy. George Church, a geneticist who helped pioneer the Human Genome Project, says it is now possible to create artificial Neanderthal DNA from bone samples, put the DNA into stem cells, inject those cells into an embryo, and then implant into a woman willing to give birth to a Neanderthal baby, the Independent reports.

"It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done," the professor, who says the plan would require "extremely adventurous female human" to serve as a surrogate mother, tells der Spiegel. The benefits of bringing back our long-extinct relatives include the fact that they may prove to be more intelligent than modern humans, and "when the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial," the professor says. (More Neanderthals stories.)