Fig. 6

Simulated versus measured contamination rates. Several sets contained simulated aDNA fragments from a mitochondrial genome belonging to an early modern human (left), a Neanderthal (middle) or a Denisovan (right). All simulated sets had damage patterns associated with a single-stranded library protocol. The double-stranded figure can be found in Additional file 1: Results. A contaminating present-day human was pooled together at various rates to simulate contamination. The dotted black line represents a perfect prediction, and blue dots are the predicted rates of contamination by schmutzi once convergence was achieved. The red dots represent sets for which the algorithm stopped prematurely due to lack of information about the contaminant fragments. The black whiskers represent the 95 % confidence interval for contamination