Story of our evolution is a lot more complicated than we have ever known

The story of human evolution is getting more complicated, the Natural History Museum's Chris Stringer says in a video for the Financial Times (watch, runtime: 2:57). Recent discoveries have now falsified the belief that ancient Neanderthals were wholly replaced by modern humans. In fact, most humans alive today have traces of at least 2% Neanderthal DNA. “This means our ancestors must have mixed with Neanderthals, [and] interbred with them maybe 50 or 60 thousand years ago,” Stringer tells us. This, he says, alongside the continued examination of fossils, is leading to a whole “reevaluation” of the last 500k years of our evolution.