My DNA has less than 4% Neanderthal, according to 23andMe, a company that analyzes your DNA to look for genetic health issues as well as tracks your human ancestry back to the original homo sapiens in east Africa. Neanderthals were north of Africa, so only those Africans who migrated out of the continent to Europe, Asia and eventually to the Americas had contact with Neanderthals…wars and sex. That’s been proven.

Love? Who knows?

What I know is that my saliva showed I have a normal amount of Neanderthal for a non-African, modern human. The range is from 1% to 4%, although I’m at the higher end, since “less than 4%” isn’t “a smidgen higher than 3%.”

What makes me laugh is where are the other 99%+ of 23andMe’s customers since I seem to have more “variants” than nearly everyone in the database? I don’t get it. When I’ve studied my health results, sometimes given in percentages as compared to others who took the DNA test, 23andMe’s data seemed to skew to Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews. In other words, mixed-species, “non-African modern humans.”

But cheers for 23andMe

It turns out that for the past seven years, 23andMe has led several initiatives to gather DNA samples and health information from Africans, Latinos and Asians in order to detect variants that cause diseases in all ethnic groups. This gives their database a diverse sampling and makes it much more valuable for all of us.

Still…there must be more than -1% of us with the normal amount of mixed-species genetic. Where are my beetle-browed cousins! Or were our forbears are hulking as once thought?