Neanderthals Are Not Just Among Us—They're Within Us
'Neanderthals Among Us' by Peter Sahlins Review
Peter Sahlins's Neanderthals Among Us is the first book to trace the story of Neanderthals in both science and popular culture, from 19th-century racial science to ancient DNA. It shows how the Neanderthal genome, mapped in 2010, revealed that humans and Neanderthals interbred repeatedly, leaving nearly a third of the Neanderthal genome scattered across modern populations. Sahlins warns the genome remains a Rorschach test for ideas about ancestry and what it means to be human.
The Neanderthal genome remains 'something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human'.
- bwnkl
> for example the 2026 discovery that interbreeding was predominantly between Neanderthal males and human females, and not between Neanderthal females and human males.
I thought this was an interesting detail in the article, and trying to find out more about a possible reason for this discrepancy, I found a recent paper concluding that this was possibly due to mate preference [1]. Neanderthal dudes were smoking hot!
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aea6774
- armenarmen
There has to be a living person that is the very most Neanderthal, it would be cool if the consumer DNA companies consensually released that. It would satiate my curiosity and probably lead to lucrative influencer money for the person revealed
- ericmcer
The Neanderthal extinction always made me think that erasure of races in our modern times will follow a similar pattern. People think of the Native Americans as getting wiped out by disease/violence over a few years, but their ultimate end (and every other races end) probably will be similar to Neanderthals: slowly getting bred out of existence until finding someone with >2% DNA is a novelty. Same thing will probably happen to any smaller populations as globalization/interbreeding means massive populations like China/India will end up being the majority of the DNA.
- riffraff
> In the 1990s hair-dragging rape scenes in the Clan of the Cave Bear novels (20 million copies sold by 1990) caused the books to be banned from American public libraries.
I think I read this book in the 90s and yes, there's a rape (maybe more?) but it's an exception as the neanderthals are generally shown as relatively "civilized", not as brutes. : the raped sapiens was actually saved as a child by the neanderthals. And there's no hair dragging scene I remember.
But it's been so long ago, I may misremember.
- mac3n
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711219v1...
"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.
This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.