The email arrives with a percentage. You are 2% Neanderthal. Something small and involuntary happens when most people read that sentence. A flinch. A joke about clubs and caves. Ever since a limestone quarry in Germany’s Neander Valley gave up a strange, heavy-browed skeleton in 1856, the word has worked in English as an insult. Slow. Brutish. Unfinished. That flinch is a misunderstanding. The archaeology shows a people who cared for their sick and injured over months and years. The Neanderthal DNA you carry is not a leftover flaw or a mark of something unevolved. It is closer to a survival kit. It came from people who had already spent hundreds of thousands of years learning to live through Eurasian winters. Those winters would have killed a newcomer from Africa.
Much has changed since we first wrote about Neanderthal DNA in 2017. Researchers can now say when the two peoples met and for how long. They can name the traits that meeting left behind, and correct a few stories that turned out to be wrong. And they have discovered that the most extraordinary chapter of the whole story was written not in Europe, but in China.
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