Nikola Solic/Reuters
- Modern humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, and those genes still impact our health today.
- Scientists think they've figured out when the two groups started interbreeding and swapping DNA.
- The results can help scientists understand how Neanderthal genes evolved in humans over millennia.
We might consider Neanderthals to be ancient and unknowable relatives, but humans were once on very intimate terms with them.
Our ancestors, for example, had babies with the shorter, stockier species and swapped DNA for thousands of years.