Two new genetic studies have shed light on just how often our ancestors got frisky with Neanderthals. Scientists analyzed the genomes of 45,000-year-old human remains found in caves in Czechia and Bulgaria, including the oldest known genome of a modern human, and found that they all had relatively recent Neanderthal ancestors.
Today, modern humans, or Homo sapiens, are the only living species of human, but that wasn’t always the case – for hundreds of thousands of years we shared the planet with a whole family of related species. While there was no doubt conflict, and we may have even contributed to the extinction of some species, we also got along
very well at times.
Genetic studies have long shown that modern humans interbred with
archaic species, including
Neanderthals,
Denisovans, and
mysterious “ghost” species that we haven’t even identified. As a result, all non-African human populations have up to two percent Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, while people of Melanesian, Aboriginal Australian and Papuan descent have between three and eight percent Denisovan DNA.
newatlas.com
