12 | NewScientist | 20 April 2019NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
A GREEK woman has given birth to a
baby boy conceived using a technique
that combines DNA from three people,
in the first clinical trial of its kind to
treat infertility.
The boy was born on 9 April to a
32-year-old woman with a history
of multiple IVF failures and poor
egg quality. Both the mother and the
baby are in good health, according to
researchers at the Institute of Life in
Athens, Greece, where the procedure
was performed.
They claim they are making medical
history, but several other researchers
have expressed concern over the
technique being used for infertility,
as it wasn’t developed for this. Instead,
it was created as a way for women
to avoid passing on mitochondrial
diseases to their children.
The technique, called spindle
nuclear transfer, results in a child that
possesses genetic material from the
mother and the father, and a small
number of genes from an egg donor.
The first child created using this
technique was born in 2016 in
Mexico. This boy’s mother carried
genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal
neurological disorder linked to
genes in mitochondria.
In the Athens trial, the woman
who gave birth only had fertility
problems not mitochondrial ones,
says Gloria Calderón at Spanish
company Embryotools, which was
involved with the trial.
The trial’s official clinical record
states that it aims to recruit 25 women
under 40 who have been diagnosed
with infertility due to poor egg quality
and who have had at least two failed
attempts at IVF.
The risks of spindle nuclear
transfer aren’t entirely known, says
Tim Child at UK clinic Oxford Fertility.
This may be considered acceptable if
the technique is being used to prevent
mitochondrial disease, but not in this
situation, as the woman may have
conceived with another round of IVF,
he says. Helen Thomson ■Three-parent
baby born amid
controversy
Colin BarrasTHE jaws of an ancient European
ape might speak volumes about
the origins of our ancestors.
A new analysis of these fossils
supports a controversial idea:
that the apes which gave rise to
humans evolved in south-east
Europe instead of Africa.
Hominins are a group of
primates that includes modern
humans, extinct humans like
Neanderthals and Denisovans,
and our immediate ancestors,
including australopiths like the
famous Lucy.
In his 1871 book The Descent of
Man, Charles Darwin suggested
that the hominin group
originated in Africa – an idea most
anthropologists believe today. But
he also wrote that the group may
have arisen in Europe because, at
that time, fossils of large apes had
already been uncovered there.
“Darwin was open-minded,”says David Begun at the
University of Toronto, Canada.
Almost 150 years later, Begun
thinks two fossilised chunks
from an upper and lower jaw
may support a European origin of
hominins. They were found in the
1990s in 8 to 9-million-year-old
deposits at Nikiti in northern
Greece. Initially assigned to theextinct ape Ouranopithecus,
Begun thinks the small yet pointy
canines suggest the specimen is
a male animal from what may be
a previously unknown species.
Small canines are a hallmark
of hominin species. Begun
doesn’t think the Nikiti ape was
a hominin, but he thinks it might
represent the ancestral group the
hominins evolved from, whichwould suggest the first hominins
lived in south-east Europe. Begun
outlined the idea at a conference
of the American Association of
Physical Anthropologists in
Cleveland, Ohio, in March.
Begun and his colleagues have
previously examined fossils of
a 7.2-million-year-old ape called
Graecopithecus that also once lived
in what is now Greece. This animal
seemed to have small canines too,
plus hominin-like “fused” roots
to one of its premolars. In 2017,
the team cautiously concluded
that Graecopithecus might be a
very early hominin.
Under this scenario, the 8 to
9-million-year-old Nikiti ape
could represent a group of
“proto-hominins” that gave rise to
hominins in Europe, represented
by Graecopithecus at 7.2 million
years old. Hominins then
migrated into Africa by about
7 million years ago.
Begun says many will reject
this because the idea of African
hominin origins has been the
leading scenario for decades,
but he hopes they will at least
consider a European alternative.
When the Nikiti ape and
Graecopithecus^ were alive,
south-east Europe was a savannah
occupied by ancient forms of
antelope, pig, rhino and giraffe.
“It’s widely agreed that this was
the founding fauna of most of
what we see in Africa today,” he
says. “If the antelopes and giraffes
could get into Africa 7 million
years ago, why not the apes?”
Yohannes Haile-Selassie at the
Cleveland Museum of Natural
History is unconvinced. The Nikiti
ape and Graecopithecus may not
be closely related to hominins at
all because unrelated primates
can evolve superficially similar
features independently, he says.
The Nikiti ape may have
hominin-like teeth because it
evolved to chew its food in a
similar way, says Kelsey Pugh at
the City University of New York. ■Did hominins
evolve in Europe?
DA
VIDR.
BEGUNThis hominin-like piece of upper
jaw was found in Nikiti, Greece“If antelopes and giraffes
could go from Europe to
Africa 7 million years ago,
why not the apes too?”