BBC NEWS | Europe | Faiths in climate change summit

Hundreds of representatives of the world's leading religions are in Sweden for a summit on climate change - said to be the first of its kind.

The two-day conference involves Christians, Muslims, Jews, Chinese Daoists and a native American representative, among others.

They aim to set a manifesto to encourage far-reaching policy goals from the United Nations.

They also want to encourage personal commitments from people of faith.

BBC religious affairs correspondent Christopher Landau, at the meeting convened by the archbishop of Sweden in Uppsala, says the lack of enthusiasm for action on climate change in some religious quarters is being tackled head on by the meeting.

The Anglican Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, says the religious community must speak out.

"Here is a major, human emergency.

"Many of our constituencies regard this still as a peripheral second-order issue - it's got to be moved up the agenda."

Neanderthals may have gone extinct because their cells couldn’t cope with climate change  | BJP

However, a warmer and less climatically stable habitat could have spelled trouble for Neanderthals with such mutations.

Perhaps the Neanderthals’ mitochondrial DNA adapted them to the cold, and they couldn’t cope when the climate started to change, hypothesized Chinnery.

However, with only a single Neanderthal DNA sequence decoded so far, that hypothesis remains provisional.

To gather more data, I think these researchers should spend a few weeks in a very warm place living off the land with minimal clothing. Then run the experiment again in a very cold place.