Humans and Neanderthals Share DNA

A portion of the current human race might be surprised to find they are part Neanderthal. A team of biologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has reconstructed the genome of Neanderthals. DNA was extracted from fossilized bones from some 30,000 years ago in Europe, and last year, after decoding the genome, scientists found no significant evidence of interbreeding. Now, after recovering 60 percent of the genome, the team has found that around 1 to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans comes from Neanderthals, although Neanderthal DNA didn't appear to play a large role in human evolution. This, however, is an early finding, and there has been skepticism in the scientific community. “This is probably not the authors’ last word, and they are obviously groping to explain what they have found,” one paleontologist said.