Not That Close to Neandertals

A team lead by Svante Pääbo at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have used next-gen sequencing to complete the reconstruction of a 38,000 year-old Neandertal mitochondrial genome. The DNA was taken from a leg bone fossil found in a cave in Croatia, says the UK’s Guardian. Pääbo's team found that the mitochondrial genes "were distinctly different to modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans." Their findings, published in Cell, also show that a Neanderthal "Eve" lived around 660,000 years ago, and that the species lived in very small numbers, maybe only 10,000 alive at any one time.