
Ancient Bottleneck Shaped Neanderthal Lineage Across Eurasia
A new PNAS study shows Neanderthals underwent a severe genetic bottleneck tens of thousands of years before their extinction, drastically reducing genetic diversity across Eurasia. The finding suggests their decline was gradual and climate-driven, with isolated refugia and fragmented populations, rather than a single catastrophe from modern humans, and helps explain their eventual disappearance even as interbreeding left a Neanderthal genetic legacy in modern humans.
