Do You Have Neanderthal DNA? These Results Might Surprise You

There’s a 2.7% chance that you do! We all want to know where we come from in the distant past, but would YOU want to have Neanderthal DNA? Are they even human anyway? Misconceptions abound with regard to these grunting, ugly, fugly, cavemen, often hurled as an epithet of derision.

First of all, according to the spectacular book “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived” by Adam Rutherford (2016. London: W&N), Neanderthals were quite sophisticated. They hunted, made fire, made art, sewed, crafted tools and pottery. They also used language. That’s pretty gifted for someone living 100,000 years ago.

It might surprise you to know that Neanderthals had bigger brains than us modern humans – well, they had no TV and social media to rot them down.

What Adam Rutherford also found was that most Europeans have about 2.7% Neanderthal DNA in them!

Not only was this estimate drawn from major studies such as the People of the British Isles Project, but also a sampling of his own DNA which showed trace Neanderthal genomes. “How do we know what a Neanderthal DNA looks like?” you might ask? Well, the entire Neanderthal DNA strand was sequenced in 2010, according to Rutherford (p.46).

I myself can attest to his conclusions. I also have trace Neanderthal DNA, about the average European percentile. That’s the neat part, that most Europeans have about the same trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA in their genetic makeup!

You can easily test this on your own. Take your Raw DNA and upload it to GEDMatch, it will sequence your DNA against all of the known Neanderthals in their database. For a list of ‘Ancient DNA’ publicly available, visit the Genetic Genealogy Tools page, which is affiliated with GedMatch.

Here are a few facts about Neanderthals to whet your palate. Neanderthals and modern humans (Sapiens) are the same species! We fall under the same genus: Homo. Therefore, we were compatible for mating – think about that. It certainly explains how those small percentages of Neanderthal DNA got in our genes!

Neanderthals first arrived in Europe around 300,000 years ago; modern humans (Sapiens) first arrived in Europe between 60,000 – 100,000 years ago. That’s quite a time spread! Even more astounding is the fact that the first hominins (e.g. Homo Erectus) arrived in Europe about 1.8 million years ago.

Neanderthals were essentially ‘European’ in that they ranged from “the eastermost tip of Spain, to the caves of north Wales, into the mountains of central Asia, and as far south as Israel” (Rutherford: 39). Modern humans entered southern Europe about 60,000 years ago only to find that there were, interspersed among the landscape, others who didn’t really look like them!

For us to carry Neanderthal DNA in modern populations means that there was introgression: multiple, sustained contact between our species over time. You can’t overlay this thought with an image of modern, city life! There were only about 70,000 total Neanderthals around at any given time, spread apart in small bands across Europe which meant that contact resulted from intermittent encounters over a space of 4 million square miles over a time period of about 30,000 years. That’s country living!

So, do you have Neanderthal DNA? Chances are if you are of European ancestry then you have, in your genetic makeup, Neanderthal DNA hiding out in the caves of your genome. It’s not a bad thing if you think about it; it speaks to our ancient origins as a species and the true complexity of our distant past in relationship to the world we are living in today.

For more information on both modern and ancient European genetics, make sure you check out Eupedia, there are all kinds of neat studies on there.