Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now mainly France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are thought to have lived until about 30,000 years ago. Meanwhile, early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Almost ten years ago, Labuda and his team identified a piece of DNA called a haplotype in the human X chromosome whose origins they questioned. When the Neanderthal genome was sequenced last year, they compared 6,000 chromosomes from all parts of the world to the Neanderthal haplotype.
They found that Neanderthal sequence was present in people across all continents, including Australia, except for sub-Saharan Africa.
"There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals. This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details," says Dr Nick Patterson, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.
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