How well do you know your ancestry? Details about my family’s past are sparse at best, from different countries, with lots of relocations, and a lack of a paper trail or record of any kind. One thing that is pretty clear though: I’m from a long line of hearty farmers and laborers. My only claim to royalty of any kind, according to my family, is that I can be a royal pain. And over the years I’ve imagined the tough, hardworking, plain folk that were my ancestors. They were survivors.

Now I can probably add another group of "survivors" to my family tree—a group that we’ve all assumed has been gone for about 30,000 years. According to new research published in the May 7 issue of the journal Science , there’s a good possibility that I’ve got a bit of Neandertal in my DNA. Researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany analyzed the DNA from Neandertal bones and found that up to 4 percent of the DNA found in present day people of European descent, like me, probably came from Neandertals.

When I read that result, I have to admit that it made a lot of sense. After all, I’ve been accusing my brothers for years of being Neandertals. But what’s so remarkable is that I, along with apparently a lot of other people, had assumed that Neandertals were completely separate from modern humans. I envisioned Neandertals’ contact with other humanoid groups as marked by confused disinterest, or maybe skirmishes over hunting grounds. But at least according to this DNA analysis, the contact got a little more social.