Our capacity to sequence human genomes has exceeded our ability to interpret genetic variation. Current genomic annotations tend to exploit a single information type (e.g. conservation) and/or are restricted in scope (e.g. to missense changes). Here, we describe Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion (CADD), a framework that objectively integrates many diverse annotations into a single, quantitative score. We implement CADD as a support vector machine trained to differentiate 14.7 million high-frequency human derived alleles from 14.7 million simulated variants. We pre-compute “C-scores” for all 8.6 billion possible human single nucleotide variants and enable scoring of short insertions/deletions. C-scores correlate with allelic diversity, annotations of functionality, pathogenicity, disease severity, experimentally measured regulatory effects, and complex trait associations, and highly rank known pathogenic variants within individual genomes. The ability of CADD to prioritize functional, deleterious, and pathogenic variants across many functional categories, effect sizes and genetic architectures is unmatched by any current annotation.

Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals. Comparisons of the Neandertal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.

We present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neandertal woman from Siberia. We show that her parents were related at the level of half siblings and that mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also sequenced the genome of a Neandertal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events occurred among Neandertals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus, interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high quality Neandertal genome allows us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans.