Science 7 May 2010:
Vol. 328 no. 5979 pp. 710-722
DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021
Research Article
A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome
Green et al., 328 (5979): 710-722
Author Affiliations
1Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Author Notes
Present address: Department of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: green@eva.mpg.de (R.E.G.); reich@genetics.med.harvard.edu (D.R.); paabo@eva.mpg.de (S.P.)
§ These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals. Comparisons of the Neandertal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.
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