Is there a little neaderthal hiding inside you?

You know how it is, you go travelling with your mates, arrive in an exotic new land and first thing you do is go out for a few drinks. The locals are welcoming enough but, let’s face it, most of the totty is as rough as biscuits. Then the next thing you know, you are waking up next to a moustached hobnob of a woman, regretting necking that last jug of what-ever-it-was-called.
New evidence suggests that our early ancestors might have had a similar experience as they left the comforting womb of mother Africa some 65,000 years ago. For the first time scientists have mapped the genome of one of modern man’s extinct relatives and the results show that, as modern humans spread out from Africa, some interbred with the local inhabitants of those exotic new lands. The locals in question are Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal man, and even now – more than 60 millennia later – some of their genetic material might be lurking in your DNA.

The study, made using samples from Neanderthal females, has taken four years and, so far, more than one billion fragments of DNA, taken from Neanderthal bones found in Croatia, Russia, Germany and Spain, have been analysed. Enough DNA was extracted to account for more than 60 per cent of the entire Neanderthal genome.
By comparing the results (published today in the journal Science) with samples from modern humans all over the globe, scientists have discovered that the Neanderthals were more closely related to peoples living outside of Africa – whether Asian or European – than to modern Africans. This suggests that early humans (which originated in Africa) interbred with the local Neanderthals they encountered after leaving the continent between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. This intermixing most likely took place in the Middle East before Homo sapiens split into different groups in Europe and Asia – it is known from archaeological finds that the two species overlapped in this region.
The results also suggest that we might have gained an evolutionary advantage from the Neanderthal DNA we incorporated into our own.
But how much of you might be Neanderthal? Well, the researchers estimate that between one and four per cent of the modern human genome is Neanderthal. So next time you look in the mirror, see if you can spot any evidence of your ancient ancestor lurking within.

View and download this week's Cosm here