From AOL.COM:
It turns out there really is a little caveman in a lot of us.
An international team of scientists has for the first time decoded the complete Neanderthal genome, and the results, to be reported in the May 7 issue of Science, offer new insights into our closest evolutionary relatives and an exciting new way to explore the genetic basis of what makes humans unique. But the big news? The scientists also found evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred. And the results of that prehistoric coupling can be found in most people’s DNA.
By comparing the Neanderthal genome with those of five present-day humans from different regions across the world, the scientists found that roughly 1 to 4 percent of the genomes of non-African people derive from our extinct relatives. “It’s a small but very real proportion,” says Harvard geneticist David Reich, one of the paper’s co-authors…
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