Some staff members at the Atlantic decided to check out their DNA via 23and Me. If you have 300 bucks to burn, you can find out your ancestry composition; genetic relatives; mother’s and father’s lineages; and, your all-important degree of Neanderthalness. Here’s an article about it. Most non-African people have some Neanderthal in their past. As Elizabeth Kolbert put it in a really interesting New Yorker article: “Before modern humans ‘replaced’ the Neanderthals, they had sex with them.”
Here’s the link to 23andMe. Let us know what you find out about yourself.
Here’s the Neanderthal report from the Atlantic editors: Alexis Madrigal had 3.6%, Steve Clemons had 4.3%, and James Fallows had 5%.
These Atlantic staffers must be smoking something. Everybody knows that the world is no older than anywhere from 6000-9000 years so how could there ever have been a Neanderthal period?