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is examined by Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, by Erik Trinkhaus and Pat Shipman, and by Ian Tattersall. In 2010, an international research team studying the Neanderthal genome reported finding convincing evidence of limited interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. ‘We found the genetic signal of Neanderthals in all the non-African genomes’, said Ed Green of the University of California at Santa Cruz, the lead author of the study. The research team estimated that about 2 per cent of the genomes of present-day humans living from Europe to Asia—and as far into the Pacific Ocean as Papua New Guinea—was inherited from Neanderthals. This suggested that interbreeding had occurred soon after the initial migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa when they first encountered Neanderthals, probably in the Middle East. No trace of Neanderthals’ DNA was found in present-day Africans.

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