I initially lost interest in Neanderthal mtDNA, simply because I couldn’t find a meaningful match in any ancient or modern population. However, I just revisited the Neanderthal genome, out of curiosity, given that the dataset has now doubled in size since I started, and it turns out there are 95% matches to the Maritime Archaic and the Chachapoya. The Maritime Archaic match is already surprising, because they were in Canada. However the Maritime Archaic are from as early as 7,000 BC, so, it’s at least ancient. In contrast, the Chachapoya lived until 1470, and had contacts, and even mated with Europeans. The match percentage in both cases is significant, with 10% of the Maritime Archaic and 20% of the Chachapoya, 95% matches to the Neanderthal genome. This plainly implies that Neanderthals lived well into what is fairly modern history. This of course in turn suggests the possibility of living Neanderthals, since I doubt anyone would notice, given that at this point, they’d be basically indistinguishable from us due to intermixing.

As a consequence, I decided to download a few more Neanderthal genomes, and there are a ton of them on the NIH Website. And as it turns out, there are plenty of people that are a 95% match to the Neanderthals (left), and these are the same populations that are a 95% match to Heidelbergensis (right), suggesting plainly a connection between Neanderthals and Heidelbergensis. If you’re interested, you can read my paper, A New Model of Computational Genomics for an explanation of the methods involved in producing these charts.