Genetic Studies of Modern Populations Show Varying Neandertal Ancestry

Research is revealing evidence that sheds new light on the genetic relationship between the ancient Neandertals and modern humans.

The complex world of human genetics research speaks a language unfamiliar to most of us, but it has opened up a new window on our understanding of the dynamics of ancient populations; and few areas of research have been more tantalizing than that surrounding the questions of how modern humans are related to the Neandertals, an ancient species of human whose morphology or physical characteristics disappeared from the human fossil record roughly 30,000 years ago. The most recent studies have provided evidence about when the Neandertal (Homo neandertalensis) and modern human populations (Homo sapiens) first diverged from a common ancestral population. They have also suggested that Neandertals and ancient modern humans interbred, and that some distinct modern populations have more Neandertal ancestry than others.

In a 2010 benchmark study conducted by a consortium of scientists and institutions, researchers compared and analyzed a Neandertal genome constructed from samples taken from the bones of three Neandertal individuals excavated at the Vindija Cave in Croatia. A genome is an organism's complete hereditary information as encoded encoded in DNA. They compared the genome with modern human genomes from...

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