We tend to think of Neanderthals as a species that went extinct, but a Princeton geneticist found evidence of three waves of interbreeding over 250,000 years, leading him to argue Neanderthals didn't disappear — they were absorbed into us

We tend to think of Neanderthals as a species that went extinct, but a Princeton geneticist found evidence of three waves of interbreeding over 250,000 years, leading him to argue Neanderthals didn't disappear — they were absorbed into us

We are used to saying that Neanderthals went extinct, around forty thousand years ago, edged out by modern humans. Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton, thinks that is the wrong word. His team’s reading of the DNA finds that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred repeatedly across roughly a quarter of a million years, and he argues that Neanderthals did not so much vanish as get absorbed into us. The reframing is an argument, and a debatable…