David Reich

They both share...

Middle Stone Age stone tools, level technology, this cognitively unique type of way of making stone tools that wasn't used in East Asia, they both have the same mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome sequence.

So the Y chromosome sequence of Neanderthals, the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals is actually modern human that came through interbreeding two or 300,000 years ago and then shot up to 100%.

frequency.

And then Neanderthals and modern humans are both the product of mixture events that happened between archaic and modern humans 300 or 200,000 years ago, demonstrably through patterns of variation in ancient and modern DNA.

And so it feels that there's something shared between Neanderthals and modern humans that's not shared with Denisovans, even though the vote of the whole genome says that Denisovans and Neanderthals are related.

So one wonders whether there's something connecting kind of Neanderthals and modern humans that's different from Denisovans, even though genome-wide, Denisovans and Neanderthals cluster.

So I'm thinking about that all the time now.

There's a known interbreeding event from the lineage leading to modern humans into Neanderthals, but it's supposed to be only 5%.

So I'm interested in that 5% is actually a sign of something much more impactful.

That is that somehow Neanderthals are in some sense deeply modern in some ways.

And even though they get swamped by archaic genes, that somehow they're actually...

have more of a modern impact than one would think.

And that the Middle Stone Age and, you know, Middle Paleolithic revolution that they share with modern humans is actually more fundamentally a part of who they are in some sense that we think.

300,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

Well, the divergence to all the archaic humans, including Denisovans, is within human variation.

Wait, what?

Yes.