The jawbone of a human who lived between 42,000 and 37,000 years ago showed some Neanderthal features. 
 
 One of the earliest modern humans in Europe had a surprisingly recent Neanderthal ancestor, revealing the two species likely interbred there, according to a new study. 
 
 The Neanderthal relative was so close to the modern human on the family tree that it could have been the equivalent of a great-great-grandparent, the research suggests. 
 
 The finding is revising scientists' understanding of when and where humans and Neanderthals interbred, as it suggests humans had sex with Neanderthals more recently than was previously known. 
 
 The new analysis focuses on a jawbone from Oase 1, an early modern human found in Peștera cu Oase ("Cave with Bones") in southwestern Romania in 2002. Anatomically modern humans populated Europe between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago. Oase 1 lived sometime between 42,000 and 37,000 years ago, making him one of Europe's earliest modern humans. [See Photos of Humanity's Closest Relative] 
 
 DNA extracted from the Oase 1 jawbone showed one of its human ancestors interbred with a Neanderthal. Credit: MPI f. Evolutionary Anthropology/Paabo 
 
 The researchers chose to study Oase 1 because the jaw showed some Neanderthal characteristics. The skull of another early human, Oase 2, found nearby also appeared to have Neanderthal traits. 
 
 The large spans of Neanderthal-like segments in Oase 1's genome indicate that one of his human ancestors interbred with a Neanderthal less than 200 years before he lived. 
 
 "One of Oase 1's fourth- to sixth-degree relatives was a Neanderthal," study co-author Qiaomei Fu, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics, told Live Science. 
 
 Evidence of interbreeding 
 
 The new finding builds on work led by Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Harvard University's David Reich, which, in 2010, resulted in the first Neanderthal genome ever sequenced. The landmark study answered the long-standing question of whether Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis interbred before humanity's closest relatives went extinct about 35,000 years ago. It showed that interbreeding likely did happen, with Neanderthals contributing roughly 1 to 4 percent of the genomes of all humans living today outside of sub-Saharan Africa. 
 
 In the new analysis, an international team of researchers, including Pääbo and Reich, found that 6 to 9.4 percent of Oase 1's nuclear DNA (located inside a cell's nucleus) was derived from Neanderthals — a higher percentage than has been found in any other modern human genome sequenced so far. 
 
 "The Oase 1 genome has several big Neanderthal-like segments, which is a quite lucky and unexpected thing," Fu said. 
 
 The Neanderthal contribution to the Oase 1 genome is between 2.3- and 3.6-fold larger than the Neanderthal DNA found in the genomes of populations living today outside sub-Saharan Africa and those of four other early modern humans from Russia and Luxembourg whose genomes have been sequenced. One of those ancient humans is even older than Oase 1, Fu said. 
 
 Where the action happened 
 
 The size of Neanderthal segments in human DNA suggest that the two species mated 37,000 to 86,000 years ago. But where and how often they did so have remained a mystery. 
 
 East Asians and Native Americans have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans, suggesting that more interbreeding happened with the ancestors of eastern non-Africans than with Europeans, the authors wrote in their paper, published today (June 22) in the journal Nature. Until now, there's been little genetic evidence that early humans interbred with Neanderthals once they got to Europe. 
 
 "Analyses of present-day genomes have not yielded any evidence that Neanderthals mixed with modern humans in Europe, despite the fact that Neanderthals were numerous there and cultural interactions between the two groups have been proposed," Fu said. 
 
 However, the new study is changing that: The proximity of a Neanderthal to Oase 1 on the family tree suggests the two species continued interbreeding long after humans first left Africa and entered the Near East. Humans and Neanderthals were mating "later as well, and probably in Europe," the authors wrote. 
 
 However, Oase 1 didn't leave much of a mark on Europe. He shared more gene variants with present-day East Asians and Native Americans than with Europeans, even though he lived in Europe, the researchers said. 
 
 "He may have been a member of an initial early modern human population that interbred with Neanderthals but did not contribute much to later European populations," Fu said. 
 
 Follow Jennifer Abbasi on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| A jawbone unearthed in Romania of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago is shown in this handout photo provided by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany June 21, 2015. 
 
 WASHINGTON You may not know it, but you probably have some Neanderthal in you. For people around the world, except sub-Saharan Africans, about 1 to 3 percent of their DNA comes from Neanderthals, our close cousins who disappeared roughly 39,000 years ago. 
 
 Scientists said on Monday a jawbone unearthed in Romania, of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago, boasts the most Neanderthal ancestry ever seen in a member of our species. 
 
 The finding that also indicates that interbreeding with Neanderthals occurred much more recently than previously known. 
 
 "We show that one of the very first modern humans that is known from Europe had a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations back in his family tree," said geneticist Svante Pääbo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 
 
 "He carries more Neanderthal DNA than any other present-day or ancient modern human seen to date." 
 
 Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich said 6 to 9 percent of this individual's genome derived from a Neanderthal ancestor. 
 
 The study, published in the journal Nature, indicates that our species interbred with Neanderthals in Europe as well, not just in the Middle East as previously thought, Pääbo said. 
 
 Previous research suggested this interbreeding occurred 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, before our species, arising in Africa, trekked into Europe, Asia and beyond. 
 
 "Modern humans arrive in Europe after 43,000 years ago, and Neanderthals went extinct by 39,000 years ago," Reich said. 
 
 The scientists said a Neanderthal was among the individual's ancestors as recently as perhaps 100 to 150 years. 
 
 Reich said genetic analysis showed the individual, a hunter-gatherer, was from a "pioneer population" that entered Europe but did not contribute much or anything at all genetically to later Europeans. 
 
 "This is interesting because it means that Europe has not been continuously occupied by the same lineages ever since the first waves of migration of modern humans into Europe," Reich said. 
 
 The robust, large-browed Neanderthals prospered across Europe and Asia from about 350,000 years ago till shortly after 40,000 years ago, disappearing in the period after Homo sapiens arrived. 
 
 Despite an outdated reputation as our dimwitted cousins, scientists say Neanderthals were highly intelligent, as shown by their complex hunting methods, likely use of spoken language and symbolic objects, and sophisticated use of fire. 
 
 The lower jawbone was found in 2002 in Oase Cave in southwestern Romania. Previous attempts to extract DNA were unsuccessful but recent technological advances facilitated the new findings. 
 
 (Editing by Bernadette Baum) ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 And the genome, extracted from a fossil thighbone found in Siberia, added strong support to a provocative hypothesis: Early humans interbred with Neanderthals. 
 
 “It’s irreplaceable evidence of what once existed that we can’t reconstruct from what people are now,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. “It speaks to us with information about a time that’s lost to us.” 
 
 The discoveries were made by a team of scientists led by Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Over the past three decades, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have developed tools for plucking out fragments of DNA from fossils and reading their sequences. 
 
 Early on, the scientists were able only to retrieve tiny snippets of ancient genes. But gradually, they have invented better methods for joining the overlapping fragments together, assembling larger pieces of ancient genomes that have helped shed light on the evolution of humans and their relatives. 
 
 In December, they published the entirety of a Neanderthal genome extracted from a single toe bone. Comparing Neanderthal to human genomes, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues found that we share a common ancestor, which they estimated lived about 600,000 years ago. 
 
 Recently, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues got an opportunity to test their new methods on an exceptional human bone. 
 
 In 2008, a fossil collector named Nikolai V. Peristov was traveling along the Irtysh River in Siberia, searching for mammoth tusks in the muddy banks. Near a settlement called Ust'-Ishim, he noticed a thighbone in the water. Mr. Peristov fished it out and brought it to scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences. 
 
 The Russian researchers identified the bone as a modern human, not a Neanderthal. To determine its age, they sent samples to the University of Oxford. Scientists there measured the breakdown of radioactive carbon and determined the bone was about 45,000 years old — making it the oldest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa and the Near East. 
 
 In 2012, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues took samples from the bone to search for DNA. To their surprise, it held a number of genetic fragments. 
 
 “This is an amazing and shocking and unique sample,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new study. 
 
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 The researchers used the DNA fragments to create a high-resolution copy of the man’s complete genome. A Y chromosome revealed that the thighbone belonged to a man. 
 
 The scientists then compared the genome of the so-called Ust'-Ishim man to those of ancient and living people. 
 
 They found that his DNA was more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans. But the Ust'-Ishim man was no more closely related to ancient Europeans than he was to East Asians. 
 
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 He was part of an earlier lineage, the scientists concluded — a group that eventually gave rise to all non-African humans. 
 
 Homo sapiens, our own species, appeared in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Previous studies, both on genes and on fossils, have suggested that they then expanded through the Near East to the rest of the Old World. 
 
 The Ust'-Ishim man’s genome suggests he belonged to a group of people who lived after the African exodus, but before the split between Europeans and Asians. 
 
 Dr. Paabo and his colleagues also found that the Ust'-Ishim man had pieces of Neanderthal DNA in his genome, just as living non-Africans do. But his Neanderthal DNA had some important differences. 
 
 Fossils indicate that Neanderthals spread across Europe and Asia before becoming extinct an estimated 40,000 years ago. Today, the Neanderthal DNA in each living non-African human is broken up into short segments sprinkled throughout the genome. 
 
 Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have hypothesized that this arrangement is a result of how cells divide. 
 
 During the development of eggs and sperm, each pair of chromosomes swaps pieces of their DNA. Over the generations, long stretches of DNA get broken into smaller ones, like a deck of cards repeatedly shuffled. 
 
 Over thousands of generations, the Neanderthal DNA became more fragmented. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues predicted, however, that Neanderthal DNA in the Ust'-Ishim man’s genome would form longer stretches. 
 
 And that’s exactly what they found. “It was very satisfying to see that,” Dr. Paabo said. 
 
 By comparing the Ust'-Ishim man’s long stretches of Neanderthal DNA with shorter stretches in living humans, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues estimated the rate at which they had fragmented. They used that information to determine how long ago Neanderthals and humans interbred. 
 
 Previous studies, based only on living humans, had yielded an estimate of 37,000 to 86,000 years. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have now narrowed down that estimate drastically: Humans and Neanderthals interbred 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, according to the new data. 
 
 The findings raised questions about research suggesting that humans in India and the Near East dated back as far as 100,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that humans expanded out of Africa in a series of waves. 
 
 But Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum, said that the new study offered compelling evidence that living non-Africans descended from a group of people who moved out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. 
 
 Any humans that expanded out of Africa before then probably died out, Mr. Stringer said.
– A jawbone found in Romania more than a decade ago provides the first genetic evidence that humans and Neanderthals knocked boots in Europe before the latter disappeared between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. Scientists who came across the bone of one of the earliest modern humans in Europe in a cave known as Pestera cu Oase noticed it had both modern human and Neanderthal traits. Now, a study of the bone's DNA—made possible by recent technological advances—explains why. "The sample is more closely related to Neanderthals than any other modern human we've ever looked at before," Harvard researcher David Reich explains in a press release. "We estimate that 6% to 9% of its genome is from Neanderthals. This is an unprecedented amount." In comparison, all people except sub-Saharan Africans share 1% to 4% of their DNA with Neanderthals today. DNA in the fossil, which is 37,000 to 42,000 years old, suggests the Oase individual had a Neanderthal ancestor four to six generations back, reports Reuters. In other words, a great-great-grandparent might've been a Neanderthal, notes LiveScience. That shows interbreeding occurred far more recently than scientists had guessed; they initially thought interbreeding took place only in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. "It's an incredibly unexpected thing," Reich says. "In the last few years, we've documented interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, but we never thought we'd be so lucky to find someone so close to that event." You aren't likely to share any DNA with the jawbone's owner, however. Reich says the hunter-gatherer was from a "pioneer population" that entered Europe but "didn't give rise to the later population." (The oldest Neanderthal DNA is some 150,000 years old.)