A recent study came out showing that humans are not so unique after all. According to the study, a new method of genetic reconstruction showed that only 7% of Homo sapien DNA is unique and the rest is shared among other hominids.
"That's a pretty small percentage," said Nathan Schaefer, a University of California computational biologist and co-author of the new paper. "This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals."
This study compared the DNA of 279 modern humans with fossils of our ancestors which were carbon dated to 50,000 years old.
It was made possible because of a valuable new tool that is able to take even missing genomes into account.
This research also found that only 1.5% of our DNA is unique to each of us and that 1.5% results in the differences we see.
This study is not even the first one to show that we are not so different after all. In the past few years, quite a few studies, both on genetics and anthropology have popped up showing that maybe we aren’t that different from Neanderthals.
These studies have shown that other hominids have shown the communal nature and love that we do today, leading many paleontologists to conclude that we used to share the Earth with other species not very long ago.