You are 2 per cent Neanderthal

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Homo sapiens aren't as unique as [music] we once thought. In fact, only about 1.5 to 7% of our DNA originated in our species alone.

[00:00:11]>> [music] >> Everything else we share with our ancestors and those human species we coexisted with including the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and even something we like to call >> [music] >> ghost populations. This rewrites the story we have told ourselves about our species. [music] We just aren't that unique. For a long time we believed Homo sapiens were the special ones, the human species that outcompeted [music] and replaced everyone else.

[00:00:40]But modern genetics has revealed something much stranger. When our ancestors met these other species, they did not just compete [music] with them.

[00:00:49]They mated with them and those encounters left a permanent record in our DNA. [music] In other words, those ancient humans we thought had vanished did not necessarily disappear. [music] Some of them are still here.

[00:01:04]Inside you. When you say that I'm 2% Neanderthal, what that means is that there were groups of people that were separated for 800,000 years [music] from each other that in the end came back together and found a way to make it work.

[00:01:18]And that's kind of wild. That's a story that our histories don't give us.