 In February 2009, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, it was announced that the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had completed the first draft version of the Neanderthal genome.Over 3 billion base pairs were sequenced in collaboration with the 454 Life Sciences Corporation.This project, led by Pääbo, will shed new light on the recent evolutionary history of modern humans.