Estimate for the average divergence of Neandertal and modern human autosomal DNA sequences

Value 8.25e+5 years
Organism Human Homo sapiens
Reference Green RE et al, A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science. 2010 May 7 328(5979):710-22.PubMed ID20448178
Method To estimate the DNA sequence divergence per base pair between the genomes of Neandertals and the reference human genome sequence, researchers generated three-way alignments between the Neandertal, human, and chimpanzee genomes, filtering out genomic regions that may be duplicated in either humans or chimpanzees (SOMText 10) and using an inferred genome sequence of the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees as a reference to avoid potential biases.
Comments Researchers caution that this is only a rough estimate because of the uncertainty about the time of divergence of humans and chimpanzees assumed to be 6.5 million years ago (in another place in article researchers give homo-pan divergence range of 5.6-8.8 million years ago, see comment to BNID 103766). Note-this is different than divergence time of human and Neanderthal populations 275,000-435,000 years BNID 105417
Entered by Uri M
ID 105416