The Neanderthal, the enigmatic Stone Age man who appears to have vanished without a trace 30,000 years ago, lives on in us modern humans. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig decoded the Neanderthal genome and compared it with the Homo Sapiens genome. In the process, the researchers explored a series of questions: What does the Neanderthal genome divulge about us modern humans? Which human capacities and characteristics hark back to Stone Age man? Why did our closest relative become extinct? One thing is now certain: the Neanderthal and modern man mixed - and we are far more closely related than we previously believed. Contrary to the assumption of many researchers, it would appear that some Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred. According to the researchers' calculations, up to four percent of the DNA of many humans living today originate from the Neanderthal.