Neanderthals are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. They probably went extinct due to competition with or extermination by immigrating or due to great climatic change,disease, or a combination of these factors.
Compared to humans , Neanderthals had a more robust build and proportionally shorter limbs. These features are often explained as adaptations to conserve heat in a cold climate, but may also be adaptations for sprinting in the warmer, forested landscape that Neanderthals often inhabited.
As it turns out, non-African modern humans have Neanderthals to thank for 1 to 4 percent of their DNA. The two species were thought to have interbred around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, based on the Neanderthal DNA found in anatomically modern human specimens and people living today.
East Asians seem to have the most Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, followed by those of European ancestry. Africans, long thought to have no Neanderthal DNA, were recently found to have genes from the hominins comprising around 0.3 percent of their genome.
