Panchronia › Amazing facts › Neanderthals died out, yet part of them lives on in us.… Neanderthals died out, yet part of them lives on in us. Their genome, decoded in 2010, showed that people of non-African descent carry a small share of Neanderthal DNA, a trace of ancient interbreeding.
38,000 BC · 2010 · apart: 40,010 years
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The Neanderthals vanish c. 38,000 BC · Europe (late traces at Gibraltar). Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, but vanished about 40,000 years ago. The causes are debated: competition with incoming sapiens, cold snaps, small numbers. They did not disappear without trace: about 2% of the genes of non-Africans today are Neanderthal. Denny, child of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan c. 90,000 BC · Denisova Cave, Altai. A tiny bone fragment from Denisova Cave, picked out of 2,000 unidentified scraps, belonged to a girl of about 13 who lived some 90,000 years ago. Her genome showed a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father: the only first-generation hybrid of two human species ever found. Prehistory · 21st century
More amazing facts 48,000 BC · 38,000 BC People sailed to Australia while Neanderthals still lived in Europe. 43,000 BC · 2008 One of the oldest modern human genomes came from a bone spotted by a sculptor. 38,000 BC · 1939 The world's oldest statue spent 30 years in a museum as a heap of fragments. 34,000 BC · 2000 BC The mammoths painted in Chauvet Cave 36,000 years ago could still be seen alive in the age of the pharaohs: the last ones, on Wrangel Island, died out around 2000 BC. 22,000 BC · 12,500 BC A boy buried 24,000 years ago near Irkutsk was a genetic relative of both Native Americans and Europeans. 21,000 BC · 12,500 BC Human footprints in New Mexico are dated to 21,000–23,000 years ago, millennia before people were thought to have reached the Americas. All amazing facts (1058) →