HUMAN EVOLUTION × GENETICS

Neanderthals

~430,000 to 40,000 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Chibanian

A sister lineage that lived across Europe and western Asia through the ice ages, in small and separated groups. Their genome, read from Siberian and European bones, and now compared with three hundred human genomes spanning the last fifty thousand years, dates the mixing precisely: one shared stretch of contact between 50,500 and 43,500 years ago accounts for almost all the Neanderthal DNA carried by people today.

Why it matters

They are the closest we can come to another way of being human, and most people outside Africa carry one or two per cent of them. That inheritance was sorted quickly: within a few thousand years of the contact, selection had already removed some Neanderthal variants and spread others. We did not simply keep what we were given.

Dating & uncertainty

The Sima de los Huesos hominins at about 430 ka already sit on the Neanderthal lineage, and the last securely dated Neanderthal sites fall between 41 and 39 ka. Both ends of the range depend on dating methods that are regularly revised.

Sources

1. Prüfer et al. (2014), Nature · The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains
2. Meyer et al. (2016), Nature · Nuclear DNA sequences from the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos hominins
3. Higham et al. (2014), Nature · The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance
4. Iasi et al. (2024), Science · Neanderthal ancestry through time: insights from genomes of ancient and present-day humans

Earth history as one day

23:59:518.2 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day