According to a recent report, Neanderthals went extinct roughly 39,000 years ago, but their legacy lives on in the genomes of most people on Earth, thanks to interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
Key points
- The study, published in the journal Nature and involving the oldest Homo sapiens DNA ever sequenced, gave a date range for the mixing of about 49,000 to 45,000 years ago.
- One group of scientists examined genomes of Homo sapiens individuals who lived around 45,000 years ago based on bones found in a cave at the German town of Ranis a cave at Zlaty kun mountain in the Czech Republic.
- A second group of researchers examined the genomes of 300 present-day and ancient Homo sapiens individuals.
- Neanderthals, formally called Homo neanderthalensis, were more robustly built than Homo sapiens and had larger brows.
- Their bodies were shorter and stockier than ours, another adaptation to living in cold environments. But their brains were just as large as ours and often larger – proportional to their brawnier bodies.
- They lived from around 430,000 years ago until their disappearance relatively soon after Homo sapiens – a species that arose roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa – trekked into areas Neanderthals inhabited in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
- Most people today have genes inherited from Neanderthals, roughly 1-2% of their DNA.
- As per report, Neanderthals were living outside Africa for thousands of years before modern humans arrived, and they were presumably adapted to the climate and pathogens outside Africa.
- Thus, some of their genes may have been beneficial to modern humans. For instance, an immune gene variant inherited from Neanderthals protects against coronaviruses like the one that caused the COVID pandemic.
- Some Neanderthal genes involved in the immune system and skin pigmentation increased in frequency in Homo sapiens over time, suggesting their value to survival.
