How Close Were Humans and Neanderthals?

Posted on | May 18, 2010 | Comments Off on How Close Were Humans and Neanderthals?


	By Frank Franklin II, AP

A reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, and a modern human version of a skeleton, left, displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2003. New fossil analysis shows that humans inherited a small amount of Neanderthal genes.

According to Dan Vergano, of USA TODAY, closer then we thought.

In his words, “Modern humans, meet the relatives: Neanderthals. It turns out, based on a new fossil analysis out Thursday, that people of European and Asian descent inherited a small amount, an average 1% to 4% of their genes, from the extinct species.

Humans and Neanderthals likely interbred 50,000 to 80,000 years ago in the Near East, concludes the international genetics team’s pair of studies in the new issue of the journalScience. The research was led by German genome researcher Svante Paabo of the Max-Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The finding splits the difference in a long-running scholarly debate over whether people are solely African in origin, or spring from “multiregional” interbreeding of early human species.

“This paper shows that the right theory is ‘Mostly Out of Africa,’ ” says population geneticist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “This study is a spectacular work of (gene) sequencing technology.”

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