Why we're closer than ever to a timeline for human evolution

Dating when our ancestors split from Neanderthals and other relatives has long been a puzzle, but DNA advances are making our evolutionary journey clearer

Anthropologists and geneticists had a problem. And the farther back in time they looked, the bigger the problem became.

For the past several years, there have been two main genetic methods to date evolutionary divergences - when our ancestors split from Neanderthals, chimpanzees, and other relatives. The problem was, the results of these methods differed by nearly two-fold.