How buying works
- You press the red buttonIt opens a checkout page run by Gumroad, the company that takes the payment for me. You type your email address and your card details.
- You are charged once$29, one time. There is no membership and nothing renews.
- The book is yoursA download button appears on the screen as soon as the payment goes through. The same link is sent to your email, so you can come back to it.
Nothing is shipped. You can read it on the screen and print only the worksheets, or print all 221 pages if you like paper.
What they left in you
These are the questions viewers send me most. The book answers each one with the study behind it and a verdict of Solid, Mixed or Myth.
How much of me is Neanderthal?
About 2 percent if your people came from Europe or Asia, and not zero if they came from Africa, where the textbooks used to say none. Nobody is 10 percent. Chapter 6 has the published range for your ancestry, to a tenth of a percent.
Do Neanderthal genes keep me up at night?
Two competent studies of the same British volunteers point in opposite directions. Chapter 11 sets them side by side, gives the verdict, and hands you one rule for reading every "caveman gene" headline you will ever see.
Did they leave me part of my immune system?
For people of European and Asian descent, the studies say yes, in part, and it came at a price. Chapter 11 names the genes, the trade-off, and what one of them did during the pandemic.
Can I see it in the mirror? What about my O-negative blood?
Both are myths. Chapter 9 disposes of the mirror at one stroke, then takes eleven traits one at a time, and tells you what blood types the Neanderthals themselves had.
None of this is medical advice. The book reads history, not medical charts, and where genes touch health it sends you to your doctor.
What you print, fill in and keep
You can read the whole book on a screen. The worksheets are the part worth printing: they are grouped at the back, and you fill them in by hand. Three of the seven, shown small.
The ten-thousand-generation tree
One page for the wall. Your name at the top, Africa at the bottom, and a line at 1,850 generations that reads "Neanderthals join the family. My share:". Sign it, date it, and hang it where a visiting grandchild will ask what it is.
My results
Ten numbered lines you fill in with a pencil as you read: your percentage, your variant count, your mother's line and your father's line.
The haplogroup route map
A map with a starting dot in eastern Africa. You draw your mother's line solid and your father's line dashed, with a rough date at each turn.
Twenty questions for living elders
For the oldest person you can still telephone. No laboratory can recover those answers later.
The "Who we are" letter
One page to the people in your family who are not born yet, saying what you found and how sure you are.
The consent card
Ten lines to settle in pencil before you order a kit, so the company's screens ask you nothing you have not already decided.
Look inside
Seven pages from the book. Four are whole and three are the top of a page. Press one to see it larger.
Slide sideways to see all seven.
Read one aloud and wait for the questions
Every chapter ends with one fact on a card. My test for each: could I say it at the dinner table and survive the follow-up questions. Three of them, as printed.
A girl who died in Siberia about 90,000 years ago had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. Her bone fragment is an inch long.
Slon and colleagues, 2018, Nature.
"Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-chromosomal Adam" were real individuals, but they were not a couple, and by current estimates lived tens of thousands of years apart. Each was one of thousands of people alive at the time.
Fu and colleagues, 2013, Current Biology. Karmin and colleagues, 2015, Genome Research.
Most Tibetans carry a gene variant from Denisovans that keeps their blood thin at high altitude. Almost nobody else on earth has it.
Huerta-Sánchez and colleagues, 2014, Nature.
Without a grandchild's help
That is the title of chapter 3, and it means it. If you can open an email and type a web address, you can do everything in this book alone.
Every step is numbered and has a box to tick
Ordering takes about 10 minutes and the tube takes about 5. The book shows a drawing of each screen in between. Where the checkout tries to add a yearly membership, it tells you where the small "Remove" link is.
You decide what happens to your DNA before the tube is sealed
In 2023, thieves got into about 14,000 accounts at one DNA company using recycled passwords, and through the relative-matching feature exposed profile details of about 6.9 million people. Chapter 2 tells that story, shows in one table who can legally see a DNA file, and gives you a consent card to fill in before you order.
How to keep your results and delete the account
Nine numbered steps: save your reports, download your file, withdraw consent, have the saliva sample destroyed, delete the data. The book also says what deletion leaves behind. Deletion is real. It is not total.
Or do not test at all
The published ranges tell you, to within a fraction of a percent, what a kit would have said. Chapters 8 through 14 need no kit. You will miss your own variant count and your two haplogroup letters. You will not miss the story.
Your first ghost takes about a minute
The quick start at the front of the book gives you three results by Sunday night with nothing in the mail. This is the first. Do it now.
- Sit down and cross one ankle over the other knee.
- Pinch the thick cord above your heel between thumb and finger. Follow it up. It runs about 6 inches.
- A chimpanzee has about half an inch of that cord. The long-legged body yours belongs to first appears in skeletons about 1.6 million years old.
That is the oldest thing you own. Chapter 10 gives you the rest of the tour, and the argument among scientists over what the cord was for.
What is inside
Fourteen chapters in five parts. Each chapter opens with a question and its fast answer.
Find them
Of the five big DNA kits, two report Neanderthal ancestry. I name them, give the list prices, and tell you when a second kit is wasted money. Then your report explained one line at a time, including why your number is not your sister's.
1. Which test shows the ghosts. 2. Before you spit. 3. Taking the test without a grandchild's help. 4. Reading your Neanderthal report line by line. 5. Your mother's line and your father's line.
Meet them
Who the Neanderthals were, with the care and the violence both left in. The Denisovans, known for 15 years from a finger bone until a skull hidden in a well since 1933 gave them a face. And the people known only from the DNA they left in others.
6. The Neanderthal share. 7. The Denisovan share. 8. Ghosts with no skeleton.
Check the mirror
The bump on the back of the skull, the heavy brow, red hair, 34 teeth. Each claim gets its verdict and the study behind it. Then the body you did inherit, from ancestors far older than the Neanderthals, and what the old genes do for sleep, skin and immunity.
9. The mirror checklist. 10. The body erectus built. 11. What the old genes do, and what they don't.
Check the claims
How anyone knows a bone is 430,000 years old, when carbon dating runs out at about 50,000. Five questions to put to any headline about ancient humans. What legends of little people and giants can remember, and where the bones stop.
12. How they actually know. 13. Legends and memory.
Pass it on
The wall chart, the twenty questions, and the letter. How to give a kit to a grown grandchild, and why her number will not match yours. What to do when a DNA match surprises the family.
14. The family record. Then the Dinner-Table Ten, a glossary without jargon, and every source by chapter.
Things I was taught that were wrong
I grew up in the Midwest, and around 1962 I learned about Neanderthals from a drawing. You may remember the same one. A hairy figure with bent knees and a forward-hanging head, club in hand. The teacher's word for him was "caveman."
That drawing came from one skeleton: an old man with severe arthritis, dug out of a cave in France in 1908. An anatomist read a sick spine as a species. Two others corrected him in print in 1957. That was 5 years before my classroom. The correction was sitting in a journal nobody I knew would ever open, and the drawing went on being printed.
I believed it for decades. Then, on May 7, 2010, a team published the Neanderthal genome and compared it with living people. Our ancestors and the Neanderthals had children together, and those children had children, and the line never broke. The brute from my classroom was a grandfather. A very distant one, about 1,850 generations back.
I am not a scientist. I have no degree in this field and no title. I am a man in his sixties who worked a job that paid for books, then spent about 30 years reading excavation reports and genetics papers and writing to the people who wrote them. So I put together the guide I wish someone had handed me. Plain English, step by step, every claim sourced.
Richard
How to check me
Every claim travels with its receipt
The team, the year and the journal are printed in the margin beside the sentence, the way they are on this page. About 150 sources in all. At the end of each chapter they are listed again with a free way to read each one, so you never have to take my word for it.
I correct myself in it
Three of the boxed corrections in the book are to things I said on the channel with a microphone in front of me. A fourth claim I withdrew because I could not find the study. I would rather you heard those from me than from the comment section.
Where the experts disagree, both sides get a name
Did that long-legged body evolve for running prey to exhaustion? What should the common ancestor of Neanderthals and our species be called? The book sets out each camp's best argument and says plainly where it stands. Sometimes that is "nobody can yet say."
Who I wrote it for
- You spat in a tube around 2017 or 2018, looked at the pie chart once and forgot the password. You may already own a Neanderthal report and not know it.
- You have never tested. You don't know which box to buy, or whether any of these companies should be trusted with your DNA.
- You would rather not test at all, and want the story anyway.
- You are the one in the family who explains things at the table, and you want the sources written down where you can check them.
What this book will not do
- It will not diagnose anything.
- It will not tell you what tribe, nation or people you belong to. Families, communities and law decide that.
- It will not tell you that you are part Bigfoot, part giant, or part anything that has left no bones.
- It will not be final. Some of what is printed will be revised, and the book shows you where.
One more thing it will not do is argue with your faith. I read bones and molecules. What you make of them on Sunday is yours to work out.
The ghosts in your blood
- 221 letter-size pages in large type, fourteen chapters
- Two PDF files: one made for reading on a tablet, computer or phone, and one laid out for a home printer
- The wall tree, My results, the consent card, twenty questions and the letter
- Sixteen dinner-table cards and the Dinner-Table Ten
- Every source, chapter by chapter, with a free way to read it
About the clock at the top of this page: a lab takes 5 to 8 weeks, so October 22 is the last day the quicker estimate still puts your results on the table at Thanksgiving. That is the lab's estimate, not my promise. The price of the book does not change.
One payment. No subscription, nothing to renew. A DNA kit lists at $79 to $145, and chapter 1 tells you whether you need to buy one at all.
Buy the book for $29Questions people ask before buying
Is it a paper book?
No. You get two PDF files. One is made for reading on a tablet or computer. The other is laid out for printing, with the worksheets grouped at the back, so you can print only those or all 221 pages, at home or at a copy shop.
What is a PDF, and will I be able to open it?
A PDF is a document that looks the same on every screen and every printer. Computers, tablets and phones open one without extra software: you click the file and it appears. To print, choose "Print" from the menu.
Do I have to take a DNA test?
No. If you decide not to test, the book tells you which two chapters to skip and gives you the published range for your ancestry in place of a measured number.
I took a DNA test years ago. Is this still for me?
Yes, and do not buy a kit yet. If your old kit was one of the two that report it, your Neanderthal report already exists, and the quick start walks you back into the account tonight. If it was one of the others, chapter 1 explains what your old results are good for and when a second kit is worth the money.
Is it safe to send my DNA to one of these companies?
That is your decision, and chapter 2 is there so you make it with the facts in front of you. I am not a lawyer, and the chapter says where to check your own state.
Is this medical advice?
No. Where a study links an old gene to health, I tell you how many people were studied and how small the difference was, and then I send you to your doctor.
Who is Richard?
I make the videos at Richard Uncovers Humanity. I have no degree in this field and I never claim one. What I can offer you is my reading, my files and my habit of checking.
Who in your family will know any of this in 50 years?
Whoever you tell. Whoever you write it down for. At 74 you are very likely the last person alive who knew the people born in the 1880s and 1890s, and for everyone younger, you are the elder. A DNA account closes when the email address lapses. A signed page in a drawer lasts as long as the drawer.
I checked every number twice. You will check them a third time. That is why we get along.
Buy the book for $29One payment, no subscription. Read it on a screen or print it at home.