Event: Neanderthal

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Most people alive today carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Now scientists are gaining a more intimate understanding of the ancient encounters that put it there.An artist’s rendering of a human skull, at left, and a Neanderthal skull. Most people alive today carry a bit of Neanderthal DNA in their genome, the result of interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.Credit...Winters860/AlamyPublished Feb. 26, 2026Updated Feb. 27, 2026, 5:55 p.m. ETOne of the biggest discoveries about human evolution in recent decades is that, tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. As a result, most people alive today carry a bit of Neanderthal DNA in their genome — and that residual DNA, in turn, is giving scientists a detailed look at the ancient sexual encounters that put it there.In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers report that men with a lot of Neanderthal ancestry and women with a lot of modern human ancestry had a strong preference to mate with each other. Maybe modern human women found something especially attractive about men with a lot of Neanderthal DNA, or vice versa. Or maybe the two groups were equally attracted to each other.However it played out, the preference was intense. “You need a strikingly strong phenomenon to get us there,” said Alexander Platt, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the new study.April Nowell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was not involved in the research, praised the study for using DNA to uncover details of our ancestors’ intimate lives. “We are learning so much in…