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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new collaborative study, led by the Natural History Museum and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has extracted ancient DNA from the Neanderthal fossils of Gibraltar for the first time. The new study has confirmed the sex of the skulls and in the case of the fossil discovered in Forbes' Quarry, has related it to Neanderthals beyond Gibraltar.

The Neanderthal fossils of Gibraltar are among the most prominent finds in palaeontology. The fossils are some of the most historic of their kind, having been discovered at Forbes' Quarry in 1848 and Devil's Tower in 1926. The authors of the new study used a DNA preparation method that reduces modern contamination prior to sequencing, to isolate the Neanderthal DNA component.

The Natural History Museum's Professor Chris Stringer said: "The analyses confirmed that the Devil's Tower child was male, and the Forbes' Quarry adult was female and genetically more similar to earlier (60,000-120,000 year-old) Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia than to younger Neanderthal remains from Spain. Although Gibraltar is often considered as one of the last refuges for the Neanderthals before their extinction, it seems that Forbes' Quarry is not a late Neanderthal."

[...] The paper was published in PNAS on 15 July.

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