has given neuroscience a sense of pessimism that the brain is similarly a black box she said our paper provides a counterexample were recording from neurons at the highest stage of the visual system and can see that theres no black box my bet is that that will be true throughout the brain population and found that neanderthals most likely had a greater prevalence of slightly disadvantageous genesour simulations showed that early hybrids would have been much less fit than pure humans said kelley harris a postdoctoral fellow at stanford and one of the authors of that paper over time this would have decreased the amount of neanderthal dna around modern human genestogether these papers tell a convincing story dr reich said the reduction of neanderthal ancestry near genes that weve observed is a strange and remarkable phenomenon he said these two papers have provided a plausible and exciting explanation