Close Encounters Of The Prehistoric Kind Summary

In her article entitled “Close Encounters of the Prehistoric Kind”, Science Magazine correspondent Ann Gibbons explains that due to interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans, modern humans still contain traces of prehistoric Neanderthal DNA. According to researchers, Asians and Europeans most likely possess a higher frequency of Neanderthal genomes than Africans because the two species “occupied the [same regions] intermittently” in Europe, the Midwest, the Near East, and Russia and may have coexisted with one another for up to 10,000 years before the Neanderthal lineage died out. The article explains that Neanderthal genomes are present in “many people living outside of Africa” as there was not enough interbreeding occurring