Genetic sequencing gives us the first-ever look at a Neanderthal clan

A Neanderthal skeleton on display in 2018 at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris. Researchers extracted DNA from bones found in Russia to learn more about how their communities were organized. (Stephane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images)

One of the things that makes us special as a species is our ability to form communities, but we humans have not always been alone in that regard. A new study sheds light on how Neanderthals built clans of their own.

Neanderthals are distant cousins of humans that lived between 430,000 and 40,000 years ago. They get a bad rap as cave-dwelling thugs with clubs, but Laurits Skov, a paleogenticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says that you really need to get that picture out of your head.