The study, which has been carried out by researchers at the Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and Dresden in Germany, is published in Science Advances.
The largest part of the cerebral cortex is called the neocortex. The researchers’ results show that the stem cells in the central nervous system – the cells that will develop into brain cells in the neocortex – take longer when the chromosomes are to divide during cell division in modern humans compared to Neanderthals.
This leads to fewer mistakes when the chromosomes are divided into their respective daughter cells. The researchers believe that this may have had consequences for the development of the brain and how it worked. Mistakes of this kind can give rise to various malformations and developmental disabilities, as well as cause cancer.
Of course, no one knows for sure whether such defects were more common among Neanderthals, or whether it may have been important because they died out shortly after the encounter with our own species, Homo sapiens.
Neanderthals existed only in Europe and western Asia, while modern humans appear to have originated in Africa. Homo sapiens eventually migrated from their original home and a little over 40,000 years ago the species spread across Europe. Soon after, the Neanderthals disappeared.