Cloning has been one of those “hot topics” for years. One of the things you find round-table discussions about late at night when flipping between PBS and the science channel or on the slate for high school debate class. Should we clone sheep? People? Babies? Well here’s a new one: soon we may be able to clone our ancient rival/ancestor, the Neanderthal.

Scientists in Germany have been working for the past five years on accurately sequencing a Neanderthal genome, from which a possible next step would be the re-creation of a living, breathing Neanderthal.

But what exactly is a Neanderthal? The term seems to have become little more than an insult to be thrown around on the playground by ten-year-olds with a penchant for multi-syllabic words. In fact, the Neanderthal is an extinct species of the Homo genus that existed from up to 600,000 to 30,000 years ago, and broke apart from the human line somewhere around 450,000 years ago. From physical and genetic remains we have been able to put together some semblance of their appearance. Shorter and stockier than humans, they boasted larger brains—due to differently shaped heads and bones—and demonstrated early use of stone tools, organized burial rights, and recognizable language, indicating early cultural organization. Neanderthal remains have been found throughout Europe and parts of Asia, and are perhaps one of the earliest examples of Homo sapiens driving an arguably evolutionarily valid species to distinction. Or maybe not so evolutionarily valid. After all, they’re all dead.

Encino Man’s entrance to the modern world is by no means imminent. The sequencing of the genes is itself a daunting task. Hours after the death of an organism cells begin to break down, to fragment and transform, making the DNA increasingly difficult to read correctly. Over the thousands of years since the death of the last Neanderthals their genes have morphed to barely intelligible hieroglyphics, painstakingly pieced together by scientists to form a coherent sequence. But even the completion of the sequencing does not immediately translate to the physical recreation of the Neanderthal. As there exist no living cells belonging to a Neanderthal, artificial cells would have to be created or vast modifications would have to be made to living cells of another species (presumably Homo sapiens). Should this theoretical cloning take place there remains the issue of creating a specimen that is able to survive, as cloned organisms are especially prone to sickness and death. There is to date no successful precedent in the cloning of extinct species.

Considering the great effort required to clone a Neanderthal the question of its utility comes to mind. What exactly would the re-creation of the Neanderthal contribute to the scientific community besides a whole mess of ethical and legal issues? As a test-tube creation a Neanderthal individual would not have the cultural history and context that would make any anthropologist giddy, and contribute to our understanding of cultural evolution. Though useless for furthering our understanding of ancient Neanderthal society, cloning would allow for biological testing on an organism with significant similarities to and distinct differences from human DNA that could lead to significant medical discoveries.

Here the ethics become slightly murky. Because Neanderthals are so genetically close to humans, to create them with the ultimate function of being our life-sized lab rats would set a precedent that could eventually translate to a form of biological slavery. We would be bringing a basic, undeveloped species into a complex world that it would be physically and mentally ill-equipped to handle, for the sole purpose of experimentation. One solution could be to refrain from cloning a Neanderthal and instead clone only parts of it. Arguably testing could be performed on cloned Neanderthal parts (a cell, an arm, an eye) rather than a cloned individual. While this turns the biology lab into a bit of a chop-shop, with its own set of ethical grey areas, there seems to be something fundamentally different between reproduction of cells or body parts and creating an actual consciousness. While it would certainly be interesting to see a living, breathing Neanderthal, here such an undertaking seems to be little more than man’s love of spectacle, and endless hubristic need to prove himself god (let us all dust off our high school copies of Frankenstein to see how this one plays out).