Knowledge about our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, has exploded over the last decade and a half thanks to the reconstruction and analysis of ancient DNA. Since the Swedish Nobel Prize winner for medicine Svante Pääbo and a team sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal for the first time in 2010, there has been a never-ending stream of new findings about the group of people who died out around 40,000 years ago and who – strictly defined – were no other species.
