Interviewee: Svante Paabo. Evolutionary geneticist Svante Paabo talks about his team's pioneering work with ancient Neandertal mtDNA. (DNAi Location: Applications > Human origins > Comparisons > DNA > Analyzing Neandertal DNA)

So, what we did was then to compare the sequence that we were able to retrieve in short short pieces that we parceled together, from this Neandertal and compare it to humans worldwide. And what we found was that it was not at all more similar to people in Europe today than to people living anywhere else. In fact, this sequence sort of branch off before the common ancestor of all the mitochondrial sequences of people living today, no matter if they live in Europe, in Asia, or in Africa. So it seems that, or we know, in other words now, that Neandertals did not contribute any mitochondrial DNA to people living today.

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