http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... ith_humans
Quote:
About 1 percent to 4 percent of DNA in modern people from Europe and Asia was inherited from Neandertals, researchers report in the May 7 Science. “It’s a small, but very real proportion of our ancestry,” says study coauthor David Reich of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.
Quote:
“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.
Quote:
But some parts of the human genome clearly do produce an evolutionary advantage, the researchers say. Again, the team compared the human genome to those of Neandertals and chimpanzees and identified places where humans differ. If nothing of importance had happened in human evolution since humans and Neandertals diverged, such changes would be spread evenly across the genome, Green says. Instead, the researchers found large swaths of the genome where humans have distinct changes not found in Neandertals or chimpanzees. The team identified 212 such regions where “selective sweeps” were likely to have happened, many of which include genes involved in brain function. The researchers don’t yet know what the changes are or how they produce a selective advantage.
so you see, wavefreak58, i have no idea what the first sentence means. they could mean 1 to 4 % of people carry some neanderthal DNA, or 1 to 4 % of our genome is of neanderthal heritage. but i lean towards the first one as interbreeding is not something that will affect all of the population.