HUMANS have strains of neanderthal DNA as the two species mated in Europe and Asia thousands of years ago, Scots scientists discovered.
Researchers at Edinburgh University have found that the two per cent of neanderthal DNA which exists in people today came from the mating outside of Africa. The finding overturns a previous theory on the link between the species which had claimed that modern Europeans and Asians are related to neanderthals because they originated from a similar sub-population in Africa. Neanderthals died out around 30,000 years ago, around the same time the first modern humans started to appear in Europe.
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