A man who died in a Romanian cave about 40,000 years ago carried more Neanderthal DNA than any other human being ever sequenced, ancient or modern. Its jaw appeared in Peștera cu Oase, and when geneticists analyzed it, the result was surprising: between six and nine percent of its genome came from Neanderthals. Because those segments were still long and intact on his chromosomes, the researchers reporting in Nature were able to determine that he had a Neanderthal ancestor only four to six generations ago. He was simply closer to the event than anyone alive today. What established the first Neanderthal genome For most of the 20th century, the history of textbooks was substitution. Modern humans left Africa, Neanderthals became extinct, end of chapter. Anatomists had spent decades observing the shapes of skulls and coming to opposite conclusions from the same fossils. This held until 2010, when a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, assembled by Richard Green, Svante Pääbo and a large team from bones found in Vindija Cave in Croatia, showed that Neanderthals shared more genetic variants with living Eurasians than with living sub-Saharan Africans. Their estimate places the contribution of Neanderthals to non-African genomes between one and four percent. Sixteen years of better data have adjusted that figure rather than overturning it. Most current estimates are closer to one or two percent, with East Asians carrying about a fifth more than Europeans. The meeting lasted How long did the two species really overlap before the Neanderthals disappeared? Two articles published on the same day in December 2024 finally gave a precise answer. A study published in Science, led by Leonardo Iasi and Manjusha Chintalapati, compared 58 ancient Eurasian genomes with 275 current ones and dated the average time of admixture to about 47,000 years ago, with gene flow continuing for about 7,000 years. A complementary analysis, published in Nature, examined 45,000-year-old remains from Ranis in Germany and Zlatý kůň in the Czech Republic and traced archaic stretches of those genomes to a single admixture event between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago, shared by all non-Africans sequenced so far. Seven thousand years is a long time to call a meeting. It is longer than anything that has happened since the first cities of Mesopotamia. The parts that didn’t make it “These deserts may have formed very quickly after gene flow,” Leonardo Iasi, one of the authors of the Nature paper, told UC Berkeley. He was describing what he and his colleagues call Neanderthal deserts, long stretches of the modern genome where archaic DNA is completely absent. Ancient human genomes from about 40,000 years ago no longer show ancestry in those deserts, which led him to that conclusion. Read clearly, it means that certain Neanderthal variants were harmful enough in a modern human body to be eliminated within a few thousand years. The Oase man makes a similar comment from the other end. Despite their recent Neanderthal ancestry, their population left few genetic traces in later Europeans. What the surviving fragments do Imagine Neanderthal DNA as a puzzle thrown and scattered among a crowd. No person holds more than a splinter, but the crowd between them still carries a fifth of the image. That’s roughly what Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey found, writing in Science in 2014, when they examined the genomes of 379 Europeans and 286 East Asians and recovered a Neanderthal sequence covering about twenty percent of that species’ complete genome. There’s also a second archaic contributor in the mix. UC Berkeley’s Priya Moorjani, lead author of the 2024 Science paper, is now studying people of East Asian ancestry, who carry a larger proportion of Neanderthals and up to 0.1 percent of their genome from Denisovans, a population known primarily from a handful of bone fragments and a huge number of statistics. Some surviving Neanderthal DNA is doing useful work. The variants that reached high frequency clustered around immune function, skin pigmentation and metabolism, fitting into a group that had spent a few hundred thousand years adapting to Europe’s winters and its pathogens before anyone else came along. Part of this is a responsibility. In a paper published in Nature in 2020, Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo showed that the strongest genetic risk factor then identified for severe COVID-19 was a stretch of approximately 50,000 bases on chromosome three, inherited from Neanderthals and carried by about half of the South Asian population and about sixteen percent of Europeans. An article, a piece of chromosome and the biology behind it are still under discussion. The provenance, however, is not really in dispute. How to call an ending like that Extinction usually means a line that stops. Neanderthals ceased to exist as a distinct population about 40,000 years ago, and no genetics changes that. What the genetic evidence changes is the shape of the ending. A population that goes extinct and a population that is absorbed look very similar in the fossil record and nothing alike in the genome. That leaves a strange little fact in the middle of human prehistory. The last Neanderthals were not necessarily childless. Some of them had children, those children had children, and the arithmetic has been silently working ever since, through a few hundred million rooms, to whoever is reading this. About this articleThis article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional. 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