Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

the mitochondrial DNA evidence could not exclude up to around a 25 percent contribution of Neanderthals to the DNA of present-day non-Africans.16 There is a reason why we have so little power to make statements about the Neanderthal contribution to modern humans based only on mitochondrial DNA. Even if modern humans outside Africa today do have substantial Neanderthal ancestry, there are only one or few women who lived at that time and were lucky enough to pass down their mitochondrial DNA to present-day people, and if most of those women were modern humans, the patterns we see today would not be surprising. So the mitochondrial data were not conclusive, but nevertheless the view that Neanderthals and modern humans did not mix remained the scientific orthodoxy until Svante Pääbo’s team extracted DNA from the whole genome of a Neanderthal, making it possible to examine the history of all its ancestors, not just the exclusively maternal line.