Chimpanzees, Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens

I've always wondered if some of my family members weren't descended from Neanderthals. Now we know for sure.

It turns out that 1 to 4 percent of the genes carried by non-African people come from interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals about 80,000 years ago. Why non-African? Because the human beings left behind in Africa never interbred with Neanderthals. For more details, read the article in today's Washington Post.

But wait - there's more. It turns out the Neanderthals carried about 73 genes of the more ancient chimpanzee version rather than the modern human version. The interesting thing is that northern Europeans, the Chinese and Papua New Guineans carry traces of Neanderthal ancestry, including the chimpanzee genes, but Africans do not.

That stands a lot of nineteenth century assumptions on their head.