Modern Africans and Europeans may have more Neanderthal ancestry than previously thought
Thursday, January 30, 2020 - 11:10
in Biology & Nature
Neanderthal DNA sequences may be more common in modern Africans than previously thought, and different non-African populations have levels of Neanderthal ancestry surprisingly similar to each other, finds a study publishing January 30 in the journal Cell. Researchers arrived at these findings by developing a new statistical method, called IBDmix, to identify Neanderthal sequences in the genomes of modern humans. The results also suggest that African genomes contain Neanderthal sequences in part due to back-migration of ancestors of present-day Europeans.