(This article is part of TIMES EXPRESS. It is a condensed version of a story that will appear in tomorrow's New York Times.)
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Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters who dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA from their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.
Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.
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''Seven years ago, I really thought that it would remain impossible in my lifetime to sequence the whole Neanderthal genome," Paabo said at a news conference. But the Leipzig team's second conclusion, that there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans before Europeans and Asians split, is being met with reserve by some archaeologists.
A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the species overlapped there from 44,000 years ago, when modern humans first entered Europe, to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.
But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. The Leipzig scientists assert that the interbreeding did not occur in Europe but in the Middle East and at a much earlier period, about 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the modern human populations of Europe and East Asia split. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.
''This is a fabulous achievement," said Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
But he and other archaeologists questioned some of the interpretations put forward by Paabo and his chief colleagues, Richard E. Green of the Leipzig institute and David Reich of Harvard Medical School.
