For my birthday last year, my lesser brother bought me a genetics kit from 23andMe. If you’re not familiar with these kits, let me sum them up for you: You hock a loogie into a plastic tube and mail it to some eggheads in a lab, who analyze your DNA and post the results to a personalized web portal.

Those results include 200+ genetic indicators, from obscure inherited conditions like Torsion dystonia and French Canadian Leigh syndrome, to the age at which your great-grandfather’s Prussian cousin succumbed to tuberculosis. Thusly edified, you can take measures to thwart whatever grisly Mendelian fate lies in wait at the end of your double helix.

That’s their pitch, anyway. Personally, I was more than a little reluctant to surrender my genetic fingerprint to an upstart business headquartered on the same block as Google. (No offense, Google, but we all know what you’d do with our genetic data if you had it. “Click here to chat with Tiffany, a local single in your genetic haplogroup!” Or: “There’s a 23.4% chance that you’ll experience male pattern baldness. But don’t worry — Rogaine has a formula for curly-haired men of Irish descent, just like you!”).

Besides, isn’t there something vaguely horrifying about asking a lab tech to reverse-engineer your human identity? It’s like a tragic Greek hero visiting one of those babbling virgin oracles at Delphi. Sure, it’s nice to know what the gods have in store for you, but if the news ain’t good and there’s nothing you can do to change it — do you really want to know?

But my brother kept hounding me, and eventually I caved. He’s a legitimate scientist, after all, so I figured his counsel on the subject carried some weight. I spit in the tube, posted it to California, and then…

TURN TO PAGE 3 for “An evil clones arrives, murders me, and assumes my identity.”
TURN TO PAGE 5 for “A team of FBI agents come crashing through my windows, claiming they’ve matched my DNA with a sample they’d lifted off a dead Vegas pawnbroker two years earlier when I may or may not have had too much to drink at a high-stakes poker game with a mafia don, then threaten to ‘throw the book at me’ unless I agree to work as an informant in a Russian gulag for the next decade.”

Don’t look for page numbers, jackass. Neither of those things happened. Instead, 23andMe sent me a hyperlink to my very own genetic profile which, I’m loathe to admit, is pretty darn cool.

For the most part I’m an average guy. My profile includes a lot of neutral-sounding results like “typical risk” and “variable absent.”

There is one category, however, in which I’m an undeniable outlier — in the 99th percentile, in fact. And that category is my genetic similarity to the species Homo neanderthalensis. That’s right: neanderthals.

At first I was offended by the notion that I share so much DNA with a prehistoric breed of knuckle-draggers .  But the more I read about neanderthals, the more I realized that I do indeed possess many of their physical signatures: I’m short, my shoulders are disproportionately broad, and I have the low, heavy brow that you might expect to see on certain Geico spokesmen.

And besides, neanderthals get a bad rap. As you may recall from middle school biology, they were not the primitive forefathers of modern humans. Rather, they were a parallel species that roamed around Europe minding their own business up until about 200,000 years ago when a horde of malevolent intruders known as Homo sapiens came along and drove them to extinction.

What these newcomers didn’t count on, though, was neanderthal swagger. See, the dainty female Homo sapiens simply couldn’t resist neanderthal men, having endured several millenia with the effeminate, high-browed males of their own species. (See what I did there?)

Long story short: There was a lot of interbreeding, and even though neanderthals went extinct, much of their DNA lives on in the descendants of those Homo sapien sluts who plowed all those neanderthals way back when.

Can you tell which one is me?

By the way, I plan to write in “neanderthal” for any paperwork that asks for my ethnicity. I’ll let you know if I get any special treatment.