On May 7, 2010, in a paper released in Science, an international consortium announced sequencing the genome of our closest relative, the Neandertal.  The team reported the sequencing of an initial draft of the genome. The genome sequence was generated from a toe bone discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia in 2010. The bone is described in Mednikova (Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 2011. 39: 129-138).

DNA sequences were generated on the Illumina HiSeq platform and constitute an average 50-fold coverage of the genome. 99.9% of the 1.7GB of uniquely mappable DNA sequences in the human genome are covered at least ten times. Contamination with modern human DNA, estimated from mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences, is around 1%.

Results indicated that Neandertals are slightly more closely related to modern humans outside Africa. The team also identified several genomic regions that appear to have played important roles during human evolution.