Because bones of one of these ‘others’ were first discovered in the Neander valley, just east of Dusseldorf in Germany, they were called ‘Neanderthals’. Recently a thigh bone of such a cross-bred individual became available, as Dr Ann Gibbs points out in her column titled, ‘When modern humans met Neanderthals’, (Science, 9 April 2012: vol 372, issue 6538, pp. Genome-wide data of three human males who lived in this cave 45,000 years ago show that all three had Neanderthals in their family lineage, from just a few generations ago. This clearly showed that the modern human population in that region had interbred with the ‘locals’ and produced a cross-bred group of people – modern with Neanderthals. The chunks inherited from Neanderthals were whittled down to 2%, but what advantages did these newly acquired genes confer on humans?

Source: The Hindu May 29, 2021 17:14 UTC