Neanderthals may not have truly gone extinct but instead may have been absorbed into the modern human population. That's one of the implications of a new study, which finds modern human DNA may have made up 2.5% to 3.7% of the Neanderthal genome.
"This research really highlights that what we think as a separate Neanderthal lineage really was more interconnected with our ancestors," Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. Both modern human and Neanderthal populations "shared a long history of exchanging individuals."
