Humans Have Some Caveman in Them

A piece of the extinct Neanderthals still exist in the world, and it's in us. Scientists found that people from Europe and Asia have around 1% to 4% of genes in them that link back to Neanderthals (or cavemen). This suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans mated thousands of years ago.

According to the Associated Press, Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, David Reich of Harvard medical school, and Richard E. Green of the University of California led a team of researchers that compared the genetics of 3 Neanderthals to 5 modern humans. They found a relationship between the 2 species that suggests interbreeding took place in the Middle East where Neanderthals and modern humans existed tens of thousands of years ago.

Neanderthals are a primitive relative of modern humans. They coexisted for 30,000 to 50,000 years together in Europe and western Asia, and it has long been suspected that the 2 species interbred. The study did not find any Neanderthal in people from Africa, though.

Paabo suggested to the AP that those who want to perceive this in a racist way to state a difference between Africans and non-Africans will most likely do so. But there are 2 ways to look at the finding. 1 is that people outside Africa could be more primitive because they have Neanderthal in them. The other is that it may be, for some unknown reason, beneficial to be linked to Neanderthals.

"My guess is, as we sample more Africans we're going to find some of these old lineages in Africa," Todd Disotell, an anthropologist at New York University, who was not part of the study, told the AP. "More people simply need to be studied."

But, as Paabo told the AP, one thing is for certain about the Neanderthals, "They live on, a little bit."