How Neanderthal are you?

Everyone outside of Africa is, on average, 2.5% Neanderthal, writes Rebecca Priestley.

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3rd March, 2012

How Neanderthal are you? Send US$99 and a gob of spit to 23andMe.com and, along with a lot of other health and ancestry data, they’ll tell you where you sit on the Neanderthal-gene bell curve. A couple of years ago, the idea that modern humans, Homo sapiens, might have bred with Neanderthals was just a theory, but comparisons of the human and Neanderthal genomes mean we know now that the two species interbred. In 2003 the complete human genome – a map of the more than 20,000 gene pairs used to make a human – was decoded and published ...

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