Hello, Neanderthal! Yes, This Means You.

We're carrying around a lot more genes from our caveman cousin than we ever knew RECOMMENDED FOR YOU Watch Ariana Grande's 'One Last Time' Video Watch Ariana Grande's 'One Last Time' Video Read What Jon Stewart Had to Say About His First 'Daily Show' Episode Read What Jon Stewart Had to Say About His First 'Daily Show… 'The Imitation Game' Director Explains Why the Movie Didn't Stick to History 'The Imitation Game' Director Explains Why the Movie Didn't… Sponsored Links by Their lives were nasty, brutish and short—and so were they, as it turns out. But our close evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals had plenty of admirable qualities, too. They were tidy and organized, for example. They ate their vegetables. They knew how to dress for any occasion. MORE Neanderthals May Have Used Tools, Making Them Smarter Than We Thought Newly Discovered Fanged-Frog Gives Birth to Live Tadpoles Fair Sentence? Man Hit With 162-Year Prison Term Gets Appeal NBC News Vegas-Bound Plane Diverts After Mid-Flight Emergency NBC News New Killer Virus Found in Kansas NBC News It’s just as well to accentuate the positive, because once scientists sequenced the Neanderthal genome, it turned out that there is a little bit of the caveman in all of us—from 1-3 percent of the average person, says University of Washington geneticist Joshua Akey, is made up of genes we got from our cruder cousins. And yes, that means your many-greats grandmother or grandfather mated with a Neanderthal before the species went extinct some 30,000 years ago. POPULAR AMONG SUBSCRIBERS Interstellar, Where No Movie Has Gone Before Subscribe The Last Men of Steel Review: Interstellar’s Wonder of Worlds Beyond Thanks to a new analysis by Akey and several colleagues just published in Science, however, and a parallel study published at the same time in Nature, it’s now clear that the Neanderthals are more deeply a part of us than anyone thought. “We all have a small percentage,” says Akey. “But my one percent may be different from your one percent.” When you add up all those one percents, say the scientists, a collective 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome has survived, sprinkled across the entire human species. And in fact, says Akey, “there’s probably more.” (MORE: How Life Began. New Clues From New Worlds) Both teams came to their conclusions through the magic of statistics. In the research presented in Science, the investigators selected the genomes of 600 modern humans from Europe and East Asia—limiting themselves to those continents since the -interbreeding with Neanderthals happened only after modern humans migrated out of Africa. Then -they laid the sequences side by side, looking for two types of telltale genes. The first would be ones that have lots of different variants—genes like those that code for height or weight, for example, as opposed to those that code for number of fingers and toes. Since Neanderthals were an older lineage than we are, their genes would have had more time to differentiate into multiple varieties. Second, the researchers were looking for unusually long genetic sequences. The mixing of modern humans and Neanderthal probably happened somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. “That’s not so long ago,” says Akey. That means that the Neanderthal genes we did pick up would not have had much time to break apart and disperse—to get genetically digested, in a sense—across our species-READ MORE-http://time.com/2837/neanderthal-genes-in-you/