One of the biggest discoveries about human evolution in recent decades is that, tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals and modern humans interbred.
As a result, most people alive today carry a bit of Neanderthal DNA in their genome — and that residual DNA, in turn, is giving scientists a detailed look at the ancient sexual encounters that put it there.
In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers report that men with a lot of Neanderthal ancestry and women with a lot of modern human ancestry had a strong preference to mate with each other.
Maybe modern human women found something especially attractive about men with a lot of Neanderthal DNA, or vice versa. Or maybe the two groups were equally attracted to each other. However it played out, the preference was intense.
“You need a strikingly strong phenomenon to get us there,” said Alexander Platt, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the new study.
April Nowell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was not involved in the research, praised the study for using DNA to uncover details of our ancestors’ intimate lives.
“We are learning so much in the labs these days about the behavior of Neanderthals,” she said, “things that just wouldn’t preserve in the archaeological or fossil record. ” Scientists first extracted bits of Neanderthal DNA from fossils in the 1990s.
Since then, the data has brought the history of Neanderthals and ourselves into sharper focus. Both groups of humans descend from a population that lived in Africa roughly a million years ago. By about 600,000 years ago, the Neanderthal lineage split off and expanded out of Africa.
Neanderthals endured across Europe and western Asia until about 40,000 years ago. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
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