Neanderthals Mixed With an Extinct Line of Early Modern Humans

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—According to a Penn Today statement, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Addis Ababa University, the University of Botswana, Fudan University, Hubert Kairuki Memorial University, and the University of Yaoundé compared a 120,000-year-old Neanderthal genome with the genomes of some 180 people living in sub-Saharan Africa today. The study found regions of Neanderthal-like DNA in all of the 12 populations in the study, which are located in Cameroon, Botswana, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. The researchers determined that this genetic material originated with an ancient lineage of modern humans living in Eurasia more than 250,000 years ago that mixed with Neanderthals before dying out. “This group of [modern human] individuals left Africa between 250,000 and 270,000 years ago,” said Alexander Platt of the University of Pennsylvania. “They were sort of the cousins to all humans alive today, and they were much more like us than Neanderthals,” he explained. Then, those surviving Neanderthals, whose genomes contained a fraction of inherited modern human DNA, eventually interbred with another group of modern humans who migrated to Eurasia some 75,000 years ago. “Because we don’t have DNA sequences from modern human fossils from that long ago, identifying these sequences will shed light on very early modern human evolution in Africa,” concluded Daniel Harris of the Perelman School of Medicine. For more, go to "Decoding Neanderthal Genetics," one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of 2014.