Or, maybe your Dad: With the help of a pinch of fossil bone
dust, scientists have discovered that modern human beings
interbred with Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago, and
that 1 to 4 percent of the genes carried by non-African people
are traceable to the much-caricatured, beetle-browed cavemen.
The Neanderthal project, which took four years and involved 57
scientists, is the latest and most astonishing example of the
recovery of scientifically useful information from ancient DNA.
The new data answer a few of the many questions about modern
human beings’ relationship with their last big hominin
competitors, who died out about 30,000 years ago. The data also
hint at what Homo sapiens had — but Homo neanderthalensis didn’t
— that may have made the difference between survival and
extinction. “What this means is that Neanderthals are not
totally extinct. In some of us, they live on,” said Svante Paabo
of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Germany, who led the genome reconstruction