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neanderthals

  • A neanderthal skull. ( Dr. Mike Baxter, Wikimedia Commons)
    Neanderthals and Fertility
    Walker Rhea
    Some of us have Neanderthal genes, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's research showing that women with a certain gene variant, or allele, inherited from Neanderthals are more fertile than women without it, and that 15 to 20 percent of women in Europe have it.
  • Some hominins were named Denisovans after the cave in Russsia where their fossils were originally found. (Deminalex, Wikimedia Commons)
    The "Ghost" Hominin
    Walker Rhea
    It's interesting that modern anthropologists can do more than just study fossil bones and teeth. Ancient remains sometimes contain surviving DNA, and this has let scientists study the genomes of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.