Few Denisovan Genes Detected in Japan’s Jomon Hunter-Gatherers

LEIPZIG, GERMANY—According to an IFL Science report, the Jomon, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now Japan between 16,000 and 3,000 years ago, had less Denisovan ancestry than other East Asians. The Denisovans were an archaic group of humans, first identified through bones discovered in Siberia’s Denisova Cave, who lived in Asia between about 200,000 and 40,000 years ago. Today, people living in Oceania and islands in Southeast Asia have generally inherited about four percent of their DNA from the Denisovans. To learn more about how Denisovan genes spread through these populations, Jiaqi Yang of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and her colleagues examined the genomes of 115 early modern humans, and compared them with 279 present-day people. Yang said that the few Denisovan genes detected in the Jomon population may have come from later contact with modern humans who carried Denisovan DNA. Or, the researchers suggest, the ancestors of the Jomon may have had only early and limited contact with the Denisovans. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Current Biology. For more, go to "Japan's Genetic History."