All contemporary Europeans and Asians are a bit Neanderthal but Africans are not, scientists revealed yesterday.
They found that everyone of Eurasian origin, including people from east Asia and New Guinea, where Neanderthals never lived, carried a similar amount of Neanderthal DNA, while sub-Saharan Africans had none.
The draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, obtained from DNA fragments extracted from 40,000-year-old bones, shows that ancestors of modern Eurasians interbred to some extent with the Neanderthals they encountered as they moved out of Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.
The discovery, published in the journal Science , contradicts the view of most palaeontologists that there was no interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans.
A large international research effort, led by Svente Pääbo of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has deciphered about 60 per cent of the Neanderthal genome.
"The results show that 1 to 4 per cent of the DNA in people of non-African ancestry is from the Neanderthals," said Prof Pääbo. "The Neanderthals are not totally extinct. In some of us a little bit of them lives on."
The researchers' main raw material was powder extracted from three fossilised bones found in a Croatian cave, as well as bones excavated in Spain, Germany and Russia.
The scientists used several gene sequencing technologies and powerful computer programs to piece together the degraded fragments of Neanderthal DNA and extract them from all the bacterial and other contaminants that built up in the bones over tens of thousands of years.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/science/05/07/neanderthal.human.genome/index.html?iref=allsearch