For our project to understand pigmentation genetics in archaic
humans, we had to find a good comparative sample of sequence
data from recent humans. The original publication on the draft
Neandertal genomes compared them to five low-coverage genomes
from different Old World populations, along with the publicly
available genomes from Craig Venter and others . The first
publication on the Denisova genome added an additional handful
of genomes to these comparisons . Some of these handful of
genomes from living people are more similar to the Neandertal
and Denisova genomes than others. That simple fact is the proof
that some living people have Neandertal and Denisovan ancestors.
But until now, the comparison has been limited to a very small
number of human genomes. That became a focus for critics of the
Neandertal and Denisovan results. How could three or four genome
sequences possibly provide an adequate representation of human
variability? We could imagine scenarios in which the
similarities between Neandertal a