information:extraction
Research history

Hybridisation between Neanderthals and early modern humans had been suggested early on, such as by English anthropologist Thomas Huxley in 1890, Danish ethnographer Hans Peder Steensby in 1907, and Coon in 1962. In the early 2000s, supposed hybrid specimens were discovered: Lagar Velho 1 and Muierii 1. However, similar anatomy could also have been caused by adapting to a similar environment rather than interbreeding. Neanderthal admixture was found to be present in modern populations in 2010 with the mapping of the first Neanderthal genome sequence. This was based on three specimens in Vindija Cave, Croatia, which contained almost 4% archaic DNA (allowing for near complete sequencing of the genome). However, there was approximately 1 error for every 200 letters (base pairs) based on the implausibly high mutation rate, probably due to the preservation of the sample. In 2012, British-American geneticist Graham Coop hypothesised that they instead found evidence of a different archaic human species interbreeding with modern humans, which was disproven in 2013 by the sequencing of a high-quality Neanderthal genome preserved in a toe bone from Denisova Cave, Siberia.