descendants. The last common ancestor of us and them is thought to have existed around 600,000 years before today. Svante Pääbo’s digging within Neanderthal 1’s arm bone was the first step in answering this. They extracted 0.4g of matter—the weight of a decent pinch of salt—from the section of precision-butchered bone, and from it pulled fragments of mtDNA. This was, in 1997, the most ancient DNA yet recovered. Much of that first study was devoted to showing that it was possible, and that the DNA extracted was not contamination.
