GENETICS

A Vanished Cousin Speaks

2010 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In 2010, from a few grams of 40,000-year-old bone, researchers assembled a draft genome of the Neanderthals and made the comparison that changed the story: people outside Africa share more variants with Neanderthals than Africans do. The extinct cousins had not simply vanished; they had entered the family. Later work found their traces, via back-migration, in every population studied.

Why it matters

A species that disappeared forty millennia ago became the first extinct human to be read at the level of its code, and the reading dissolved the boundary around 'us'. Palaeontology's questions, who met whom, who descends from whom, became answerable in the laboratory, launching the ancient-DNA decade that populates half this timeline. The technical feat, rescuing a genome from contamination and decay, was honoured with a Nobel Prize.

Dating & uncertainty

The draft Neanderthal genome was published in May 2010, from bones of three individuals. Its headline finding, one to four percent Neanderthal ancestry in non-Africans, has since been refined, and back-migrations even carried traces into African populations; the admixture dating itself is another fiche.

Sources

1. Green et al. (2010), Science · A draft sequence of the Neandertal genomedoi:10.1126/science.1188021
2. Wall et al. (2013), Genetics · Higher levels of Neanderthal ancestry in East Asians than in Europeansdoi:10.1534/genetics.112.148213
3. Chen et al. (2020), Cell · Identifying and interpreting apparent Neanderthal ancestry in African individualsdoi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.012

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:554.4 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day