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After the 2010 publication of the Neanderthal draft genome sequence, evolutionary biologist Joshua Akey, then at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his graduate student Benjamin Vernot began looking into its most provocative implication: that the ancient hominins had bred with the ancestors of modern humans. Neanderthals had been living in Eurasia for more than 300 millennia when some human ancestors left Africa some 60,000–70,000 years ago, and according to the 2010 publication, in which researchers compared the Neanderthal draft genome with modern human sequences, about 2 percent of the DNA in the genomes of modern-day people with Eurasian ancestry is Neanderthal in origin.1
To investigate the archaic ancestry of the living human population, Akey and Vernot set to work searching for Neanderthal DNA in modern genomes. They developed a statistical approach to identify genetic signatures suggestive of Neanderthal ancestry in ...
