Tiny Neanderthal Populations Drove Rapid Divergence

A high‑coverage male Neanderthal genome from Altai (110,000 years old) shows the local Neanderthal group was tiny (effective size ~50), highly related across millennia, and genetically diverged from European Neanderthals faster than the most divergent modern human populations. These results imply strong population structure and isolation can produce rapid genetic differentiation and that interbreeding with Denisovans further tangled archaic ancestry. — This reframes how we read genetic distances in human evolution and cautions against simple interpretations of divergence as linear time — with implications for narratives about human uniqueness, migration, and the interpretation of ancient DNA.