Q: Given a passage and a query based on the passage, generate an unambiguous, concise and simple answer to the query from information in the passage. Note that the answer may not be present in exact form.
More accurate dating at Neanderthal sites in recent years has generally pushed back the 30,000-year date for Neanderthal extinction, says paleontologist Katerina Harvati of Germany's University of Tuebingen, making the new study results look more reasonable. Shanidar Cave, which dates to sixty to eighty thousand years ago, is a Neanderthal site in modern-day Iraq. The excavations of this site are important when considering the question of whether Neanderthals buried their dead12. Skhul Cave, in Israel, is a site that was inhabited by AMH during the Middle Pleistocene6. The result is that mtDNA is passed on only along the maternal line. This means that all of the mtDNA in the cells of a person's body are copies of his or her mother's mtDNA, and all of the mother's mtDNA is a copy of her mother's, and so on. No matter how far back you go, mtDNA is always inherited only from the mother. If you went back six generations in your own family tree, you'd see that your nuclear DNA is inherited from 32 men and 32 women. Your mtDNA, on the other hand, would have come from only one of those 32 women. Moreover, the researchers determined that the common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens lived as long as 500,000 years ago, well before the most recent common mtDNA ancestor of modern humans. This suggests (though it does not prove) that Neanderthals went extinct without contributing to the gene pool of any modern humans. Final note The Neanderthal genes that turn up in people today are from this older era, after the two species were in contact but well before Neanderthal extinction. The intermingling seen in the new study took place after that early interbreeding era, Higham says. Although we know far more about Neanderthals than we did when they were first discovered (or even fifty years ago),just as many questions remain. As the body of research on the subject of Neanderthals grows, however, the picture will only get clearer. Shanidar Cave, which dates to sixty to eighty thousand years ago, is a Neanderthal site in modern-day Iraq. The excavations of this site are important when considering the question of whether Neanderthals buried their dead 12. New fossil dates show our ancient cousins disappeared 40,000 years ago. View Images A Neanderthal jawbone from Spain was among those dated for a new study that pushes back the date for the Neanderthals' demise. Photograph by Thomas Higham, University of Oxford PUBLISHED August 20, 2014 This, in fact, has been done, with mtDNA from the bones of Neanderthals. Comparing mtDNA of these Neanderthals to mtDNA of living people from various continents, researchers have found that the Neanderthals' mtDNA is not more closely related to that of people from any one continent over another. Here is a series of short summaries of some of the more important Neanderthal sites, some of which have already been discussed in this section. 1 Atapuerca is a large site in Spain with several different areas. The Sima de los Huesos is notable for containing the well-preserved skeletons of various ages. Query: how far back do neanderthals date
A:
Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens lived as long as 500,000 years ago.