Controversy still surrounds the issue of the relationship between the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. The popular imagination, as reflected in “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” assumes that the two species were mutually hostile. But at the same time a persistent fantasy exists about sexual relations between the species. Until about a decade ago, that possibility was rejected by mainstream researchers of human evolution.
But in 2010, the picture changed. It was discovered that the human genome contains no little Neanderthal DNA – indeed, it constitutes as much as 4 percent of human genetic makeup. Indeed, it appears that all humans of European or Asian origin carry genetic material of Neanderthal forebears. But the picture is perhaps different than we may have thought.
Last October, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to the Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo, one of the leading researchers of the Neanderthal genome.
It turns out that the difference between the Neanderthal genome and that of modern humans is far less than the difference between any two random humans of today. About 70 percent of the Neanderthal genome can be found within the human genome, “which means that in effect Neanderthals are not really extinct at all, they are in us,” as Paabo told The Guardian newspaper.
