About a decade ago, researchers managed to extract DNA from Neanderthal bones and sequence the genome.[51] When they compared their findings to the Homo sapiens genome, they realized that anyone alive today whose ancestors are Europeans, Asians or Native Americans has inherited about 2 percent of their genes from Neanderthals.[52] While this might not sound like much, we don’t all have the same bits of Neanderthal DNA and when we pool all these gene variants they account for about 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome[53]—providing incontrovertible evidence that the two species not only met,
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