About 150,000 years ago, a Neanderthal fell into a cave well and got stuck. After the ‘Altamura Man’ died, his body was slowly covered in calcite, which caused his skeleton to fuse with the cave and eventually provided the oldest sample of Neanderthal DNA ever obtained. Source Source 2
Researchers reconstructed a hyper-realistic model of his face and body…
…and the high-quality genome sequence was taken from this small toe bone.
