GENETICS

The Neanderthal Genome

2010 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

The first Neanderthal genome, read in 2010 from bones found in Croatia, showed that people outside Africa carry Neanderthal DNA and sub-Saharan Africans do not.

The first Neanderthal genome, established in May 2010 from a few grams of bone from three individuals of Vindija cave, in Croatia, dated to about 40,000 years, permitted a three-term comparison: populations outside Africa share more variants with Neanderthals than do sub-Saharan African populations. The reasoning rests on that imbalance and not on the resemblance itself. If Neanderthals were merely a sister lineage of humanity as a whole, they would be equally distant from each of its populations, all descending from the same common ancestor with them; an excess of resemblance with a single group cannot therefore come from that ancestor and presupposes a direct contribution, subsequent to the separation of the lineages. The conclusion is admixture, then estimated at one to four per cent of non-African ancestry.

Why it matters

Questions of ancestry and of encounter between vanished populations, until then treated through fossil morphology, became questions of measurement. All the genetic results presented in this edition proceed from this method. Svante Pääbo, who directed the work, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022.

Dating & uncertainty

The draft genome appears in May 2010. The one-to-four-per-cent estimate has since been refined, and back-migration from Eurasia has introduced traces of Neanderthal ancestry into African populations. The dating of the admixture is the subject of a separate entry.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:554.4 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day