Science is ever evolving, just like the human race | Kenan Malik

Scientific knowledge, whether about a human species or the planets, is powerful because it is provisional and cumulative

For the past decade, scientists have thought that DNA sequences from Neanderthals were found only in non-African populations. Neanderthals, a human species that died out around 40,000 years ago, lived mainly in Europe and parts of Asia.

As Homo sapiens migrated from Africa into Europe and Asia some 70,000 years ago, the two species mingled. Roughly 2% of the genomes of modern European and Asian populations is inherited from Neanderthals. But sub-Saharan Africans, it was believed, possessed no Neanderthal DNA.

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