The Neandertal Genome website will be retired at the end of June 2023. Details about how to access data previously hosted by this resource can be found at the Ensembl Neandertal Project website.

Neandertals were the closest relatives of living humans, living in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago. The Neandertal genome project was initiated in 2006 to sequence the 3 billion bases that make up the complete genome of this closest human relative.

Ensembl’s Neandertal Genome website was created in 2010 to present a mapping of the Neandertal genome sequencing reads to the human genome, rather than an independent assembly of the Neandertal genome. The genome in the site contains data for 1x coverage of the Neandertal genome derived from 3 Neandertal individuals from Vindija cave, Croatia. 

Data are available for each individual, as well as for a combined consensus of the three individuals. Although we are retiring the website, we will continue to make this data available from our FTP site and you can see more information about the ongoing sequencing project on the original project website.
If you have any questions about the retirement of the Neandertal Genome website please get in touch via Ensembl helpdesk.