Yea, I wonder how that&#x27;s reconciled.  The Neanderthal DNA comes from a 38k year-old specimen:<p>&gt; The researchers recovered ancient DNA of Neanderthals by extracting the DNA from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave, Croatia, and other bones found in Spain, Russia, and Germany.[8] Only about half a gram of the bone samples (or 21 samples each 50–100 mg[1]) was required for the sequencing, but the project faced many difficulties, including the contamination of the samples by the bacteria that had colonized the Neanderthal&#x27;s body and humans who handled the bones at the excavation site and at the laboratory.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neanderthal_genome_project" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neanderthal_genome_project</a><p>2^(38000&#x2F;521)=10^22, so there must be other effects.  That Nature article says<p>&gt; The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.<p>which I don&#x27;t know how to square with the 521 year figure.  I think maybe 521 years is at the high temp?