Beth Shapiro

Right.

Right.

This is one of the super fun things about ancient DNA, right?

So I think, I don't know, remember who it was who said this, but we don't have any idea if your bone, you paleoanthropologist, if your bone has descendants, right?

But I know that my DNA has ancestors.

So I can learn a ton by sequencing the DNA from the people that are around.

And if I am lucky enough to get it from these bones that I know is real about human history, and paleoanthropologists and archaeologists in the beginning of ancient DNA hated it because it was going in and going, oh, no, turns out you were wrong about that.

Oh, Neanderthals and humans didn't interbreed.

Oh, turns out you were wrong about that.

And now we know that they did.

And we've been able to learn so many cool things about humans from studying this Neanderthal genome.

I mean, I know people get hung up on DNA and how you need lots of DNA to define a species.

But we have been able now to look...

I think one of the coolest things that we've learned from the Neanderthal genome is that we all know that we have somewhere between 2% and 5% Neanderthal DNA in our genomes.

We kind of get that now.

You can get your DNA tested at one of these DNA testing places, and they'll even tell you how much Neanderthal you are so you can have a competition with your brother and your cousins, right?

I'm more Neanderthal than you.

I'm amazing.

Less well-known, though, is that we all have a different 2% to 5% Neanderthal DNA.

And if you were to go around the world and collect all of the Neanderthal DNA sequences that are in people alive today, we could put together like 93% of the Neanderthal genome.