Neanderthals are the closest relatives of currently living humans. They lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago. For more than a hundred years, palaeontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover their evolutionary relationship to modern humans. Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was first sequenced in 1997. Now the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the 454 Life Sciences Corporation in the US have announced a new milestone in Neanderthal research. The two groups have sequenced a total of more than 3 billion bases of Neanderthal DNA, generating a first draft sequence of the entire Neanderthal genome. Altogether, these fragments make up more than 60% of the entire Neanderthal genome. These DNA sequences can now be compared to the previously sequenced human genomes in order to arrive at some initial insights into how the genome of this extinct form differed from that of modern humans.