This news has been in the works for several years, from the first reports of gene sequences in 2006 to a public overview at last year's AAAS meeting. Today's issue of Science now contains the final product: the first draft sequence of one of our recent human relatives, the Neanderthal.
There's lots of information here for the genomics obsessive, which we'll get to later, but there's also some generally significant findings, including evidence that the ancestors of some human populations interbred with Neanderthals.
