I'm glad to announce that our paper with @SkovLaurits @mikkelschierup @Elise_Lucotte and co. about the nature of the introgressing Neanderthal is out!

To find out more about it, you can read it

http://disq.us/t/3o2byez 

Or you can also follow this thread

After the African exodus, humans mixed with Neanderthals 50kya. As a consequence, 2% of the genome of non-Africans is Neanderthal in origin. Recently, @SkovLaurits, a former postdoc at @AarhusUni, developed a method to detect this intriguing fraction in our genomes.

Because this 2% is scattered in our DNA in small fragments, and not all fragments are shared among individuals, it is possible to reconstruct the genome of the extinct Neanderthal population.

Importantly, the more individuals analysed, the more undiscovered fragments can be found.
Thus, the Neanderthal genome can be reconstructed assessing the sequences of people alive today.

That is why our group collaborated with deCODE genetics in Iceland, which has one of the largest and best quality dataset. Together we started the Icelandic Neanderthal Project two years ago.

From the sequences of 27,566 Icelanders, we dig up 14 M archaic fragments, which add up to 50% of the introgressing Neanderthal genome. This exceeds the results of similar studies.

However, not all fragments are of Neanderthal origin: a notorious number of fragments have a Denisovan ancestry. To explain such amount of Denisova sequences in Icelanders, we propose a previously undescribed Denisova admixture:

either to the Neanderthal population - which later mixed with modern humans - or a direct introgression from Denisova into non-Africans. This hints to the possibility that Denisova populations could be present more west of what has been reported.

When we compared archaic fragments to its human homologs we found a slight difference in the mutation type. These contrasts pointed towards Neanderthal mothers being older and fathers being younger than in humans.

Finally, with the great experience in phenotype-genotype association studies of deCODE, we show that the contribution of archaic heritage to our phenotype and medical traits is scarce, much less than what was previously thought.

I'd like to thank all people involved in the project specially mentioning @atbruguer for the beautiful drawings in this thread and Jordi Farreras for the cover proposal!

BONUS TRACK:

@SkovLaurits, this is not the only achievement in our scientific careers... check this out!