New investigations into humanity’s ancient interactions with an enigmatic “lost” species are revealing the complex world our early ancestors once shared.
The recent research conducted by an international team of geneticists and AI experts has revealed that the lives of early modern humans and Neanderthals were more interconnected than previously thought. Significantly, the study points to waves of interbreeding over time that fundamentally shaped the genetic makeup of modern humans and offers new insights into the mysterious disappearance of the Neanderthals.
Led by Joshua Akey from Princeton University, the team says it has discovered evidence of such genetic exchanges dating back as far as 250,000 years. This data challenges existing theories about human migrations in the ancient world and what factors may have steered human evolution over time.
The new findings point to a far deeper level of interaction that once occurred between ancient humans and our Neanderthal cousins.
THE NEANDERTHAL ENIGMA
First discovered in 1856, what eventually came to be recognized as the first known Neanderthal bones were found in a limestone quarry in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany. The discovery introduced these mysterious archaic hominins to the paleoanthropological record and prompted serious scientific interest in what factors shaped human evolution over time.
Once mischaracterized as slow and lacking intelligence, mounting evidence of traits exhibited by Neanderthals, including advanced stone toolmaking and the possibility that they may have treated each other’s injuries, is continually reshaping our ideas about their intelligence levels.
While similar to us in many ways, the differences between Neanderthal remains and those of modern humans have long remained intriguing to scientists, raising questions that have deepened in recent years with the discovery of another hominin group, known as the Denisovans, that once also populated parts of Asia and South Asia as recently as the latter part of the last Ice Age.
Now, Akey and his team at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics are uncovering deeper insights than ever before into the genetic history modern humans share with the Neanderthals, who mysteriously vanished from the fossil record around 40,000 years ago.
According to Akey and his team, multiple different waves of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans appear to have taken place.
“We now know that for the vast majority of human history, we’ve had a history of contact between modern humans and Neanderthals,” Akey recently said.
Liming Li, a professor at Southeast University in China who was also a contributor to the study, called the team’s findings “the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture.”
Hellbound and Down 