I have mentioned the PLoS Genetics paper, The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans, before because a version of it was put up on arXiv. The final paper has a few additions. For example, it mentions the generally panned (at least in the circles I run in) PNAS paper which suggested that ancient population structure could produce the same patterns which were earlier used to infer admixture with Neandertals (the authors also point to Yang et al. as a support for the proposition of admixture rather than structure). The primary result, dating the admixture between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans ~40-80,000 years before the present, is reiterated.
An interesting aspect is that their method is to utilize linkage disequilibrium (LD) decay. It’s interesting because tens of thousands of years is a hell of a long time to be able to detect an admixture event via LD! In particular because there’s likely a palimpsest effect where there are intervening admixtures and other assorted demographic events (e.g., bottlenecks and selective sweeps can also generate LD). So how’d they do it? Basically the authors figured out a way to …