On Jan. 29, 2014, Neanderthal genes were unearthed in modern humans by University of Washington scientists Benjamin Vernot and Joshua M. Akey, population geneticists from the Department of Genome Sciences.

A new approach applied to analyzing whole-genome sequencing data from 665 people from Europe and East Asia showed that more than 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome survives in the DNA of this contemporary group. The study was published in Science Express.