Neanderthal genetics

Genetic studies on Neanderthal ancient DNA became possible in the late 1990s. The Neanderthal genome project, established in 2006, presented the first fully sequenced Neanderthal genome in 2013.

Since 2005, evidence for substantial admixture of Neanderthal DNA in modern populations is accumulating.

The divergence time between the Neanderthal and modern human lineages is estimated at between 750,000 and 400,000 years ago. The recent time is suggested by Endicott et al. (2010) and Rieux et al. (2014). A significantly deeper time of parallelism, combined with repeated early admixture events, was calculated by Rogers et al. (2017).