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Modern Africans have an average of 17 megabases of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, according to an analysis published today (January 30) in Cell. While that’s still quite a bit less than the 50-plus megabases of Neanderthal DNA found in the genomes of modern Eurasians, it’s more than some scientists expected—and quite a bit more than the zero assumed by the statistical methods that have been used to identify Neanderthal ancestry in modern human genomes.
“We always knew that there was some Neanderthal DNA in Africans,” says Janet Kelso, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who was not involved in the study. “What’s surprising here is the amount. It’s actually a larger proportion than I think people had imagined.”
Tony Capra, an evolutionary geneticist at Vanderbilt University who also did not participate in the research, concurs. “I wouldn’t have expected ...
