Just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species, in 1856, the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.  

In The Descent of Man, however, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were the ancestors to humans based on the larger size of the Neanderthal skull.

“Nevertheless,” Darwin noted, “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious”—the skull was too large to be a human ancestor.

Darwin was right. The journal Science on May 7, 2010, published an article entitled “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” confirming Darwin’s position that the Neanderthal could not be an ancestor to humans. According to Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y., the “publication of the full Neandertal genome is a watershed event, a major historical achievement.” 

Svante Pääbo of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany led the study team. “[Neanderthals] are not totally extinct,” Pääbo said. “In some of us they live on, a little bit.”

John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, told BBC News: “They’re us. We’re them.”

“[T]he really surprising thing for many of us,” noted Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at London’s Natural History Museum, “is the implication that there has been some interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in the past.”

This interbreeding finding is a monumental discovery since interbreeding is a defining factor for defining a species. Our current modern definition of species was developed by Ernst Mayr—Darwin’s Bulldog of the twentieth century.

In the 1942 book entitled Systematics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr established the Biological Species Concept (BSC): species consist of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and are reproductively isolated from other such populations. Since humans and Neanderthals are now known to be isolated reproductive populations, they represent a single species—”They’re us. We’re them.”

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is a landmark scientific achievement. The sequencing is a culmination of a four-year investigation led from Germany’s Max Planck Institute.

Use of efficient “high-throughput” technology allowed the numerous DNA sequences to be processed at the same time from the bones of three different Neanderthals found at Vindija Cave in Croatia.

A major obstacle overcome in the study was the retrieval of quality DNA material from remains Neanderthal DNA contaminated with vast quantities of bacterial and fungal DNA. Even, the Neanderthal DNA had broken down into very short segments and had changed chemically. Since the contamination, breaks, and chemical changes were thought to be of a predictable nature, the researchers developed a software program to estimate the original DNA sequence of the Neanderthal genes.

The DNA evidence from the Neanderthal clearly aligns with the biblical account—the Neanderthals are human, descendants of Adam and Eve. Worldwide dispersion after Babel followed by environmental pressures afterward resulted in people groups with different physical characteristics, including humans with “Neanderthal” Characteristics.

Cellular biologist, David DeWitt, noted that the research was an “amazing feat” of science that continues to demonstrate the validity of the biblical record. “Finding Neanderthal DNA in humans was not expected by evolutionists, but it was predicted from a creation standpoint because we have said all along that Neanderthals were fully human: descendants of Adam and Eve just like us”.

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