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In the long stretch of prehistory, humans weren’t alone. One of the groups they shared the world and sometimes their lives with were the Neanderthals. Now, a new DNA study suggests those encounters followed a pattern and most often, it was Neanderthal men and human women who got together and interbred. This left a genetic signature that is still found in then DNA of many of us today. It provides a clue as to how our species evolved, how cultures may have collided, and how even the most intimate moments of the distant past shaped who we are now. I have been speaking to Dr Alexander Platt, a senior research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the research.

Link to the study 'Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased': https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6774

Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gM-XDB9tDEw

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