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(Photo : Max Fleischer, Dave Fleischer and Ovide Decroly on Wikimedia Commons)
Since modern humans left Africa around 50,000 years ago, ancient DNA from Neanderthals and early modern humans revealed that the two groups actually interbred somewhere in the Near East. As a result, anyone outside of Africa carries about 2% to 3% Neanderthal DNA. Those Neanderthal DNA segments grew progressively shorter in modern human genomes over time, and their length can be used to approximate when a person lived.
Furthermore, archeological evidence released last year indicates that modern humans were already present in southeastern Europe 47-43,000 years ago. However, nothing is known about who these early human colonists were - or their connections to ancient and modern human communities - owing to a shortage of reasonably complete human fossils and the absence of genomic DNA.