And now the method is being used to study our remote ancestors. An excited tweet in April signalled the incredible Neanderthal discovery: “Today we published a paper where we get Neanderthal DNA from cave dirt, and use that DNA to study Neanderthal history across thousands of years. We’ve worked on this for a few years now, I’m so excited for it to be out!” The tweeter was Dr Benjamin Vernot, a bespectacled population geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, lead author on a paper published in the journal Science. The DNA found by his group revealed incredible details about individual Neanderthals. It appeared that not one, but two Neanderthal bands lived in one of the caves they studied; the original population replaced by a later group around 100,000 years ago.