Susan E. Ptak

TL;DR: A 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil that is exceptionally free of contamination from modern human DNA is identified and it is revealed that modern human and Neanderthal DNA sequences diverged on average about 500,000 years ago.

TL;DR: The sequencing and assembly of the bonobo genome is reported to study its evolutionary relationship with the chimpanzee and human genomes, and it is found that more than three per cent of the human genome is more closely related to either theBonobo or the chimpanzees genome than these are to each other.

TL;DR: It is shown that regions that experience less recombination have reduced divergence to chimpanzee and to baboon, as well as lower levels of diversity, which suggests that mutation and recombination are associated processes in humans, so that the positive correlation between diversity and recombinations may have a purely neutral explanation.

TL;DR: Estimating recombination rates from 14 Mb of linkage disequilibrium data in central chimpanzee and human populations suggests that recombination hotspots are not conserved between the two species and that recombine rates in larger genomic regions are only weakly conserved.

TL;DR: It is found that measures of GC and CpG content, simple-repeat structures, as well as the distance from the centromeres and the telomeres predict diversity as wellAs divergence, and large-scale recombination rates measured from pedigrees are still significant predictors of human diversity and human-chimpanzee divergence.