Most of us harbor about 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, inherited when our ancestors bred with Neanderthals more than 50,000 years ago. This was revealed back in 2010, when geneticists salvaged enough fragments of ancient DNA from Neanderthal bones to piece together a full genome. The discovery squelched a longstanding debate over whether Neanderthals and modern humans met — they did — and mated — oh yeah.
But why do we only have 2 percent Neanderthal ancestry? And what are the effects of that Neanderthal DNA on living humans? And why did our ancestors survive and Neanderthals go extinct? We’ve attributed our supremacy to bigger brains, better diets and advanced technology, but there may be a subtler, less flattering explanation for our evolutionary success.
Computational geneticists Kelley Harris of Stanford University and Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley propose a simple answer to all of these questions: Due to ...
