The evidence has been mounting for twelvemonth that early humans and Neanderthals interbreed , but now it ’s pretty much a certainty . Part of the X chromosome find in people from outside Africa originally total from our Neanderthal cousins .
It ’s kind of amazing to cogitate that , as recently as just a few years ago , the scientific consensus was that humans and Neanderthals were totally freestanding coinage and probably did n’t interbreed . Since then , a ton of novel evidence has hail to light to alter that position , and now new enquiry from Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal more or less completes this big turnaround .
Neanderthals , one of the last extant hominid species other than our own , left Africa somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 long time ago and descend mostly in Europe until they went extinct 30,000 years ago . former innovative humans leave Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 year ago , mean they overlap with Neanderthals in prison term and post for at least 20,000 years . On an evolutionary time scale , that ’s not a ton of sentence , but could it be enough to leave lasting evidence of homo / Neanderthal interbreeding ?
According to Dr. Labuda , the answer is an emphatic “ yes . ” Back in the former ’ 00s , he and his team had identify a exceptional piece of DNA in the human X chromosome that seemed out of place with everything else , and they wondered whether it might have originated from a non - human source .
That answer fare with the first sequencing of the Neanderthal genome last year . Dr. Labuda compared 6,000 chromosomes from all over the world to the corresponding part of the Neanderthal sequence . With the exception of people from sub - Saharan Africa – whose ancestors would have been improbable to come up into contact with Neanderthals , since their territories did n’t overlap – every chromosome featured evidence of the Neanderthal succession .
That even includes peculiarly far - flung mathematical group of humans like native Australians , who are thought to have reached the island continent by as far back as 40,000 old age ago . For that chronological succession to show up even in such geographically isolated groups , it suggests that there was a fate of interbreeding between the two hominid species , and that pretty much all ancient man that left Africa passed through boorish dominion and had close interaction ( read : a ton of sex ) with their evolutionary first cousin .
Here are some reaction from other scientist to Dr. Labuda ’s find :
Dr. Nick Patterson , MIT and Harvard :
“ There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mat with our ancestors and Neanderthals . This is a very nice termination , and further analysis may help determine more details . ”
Dr. David Reich , Harvard Medical School :
“ Dr. Labuda and his fellow worker were the first to distinguish a genetical variation in non - Africans that was likely to have come from an primitive population . This was done completely without the boorish genome sequence , but in visible radiation of the Neanderthal succession , it is now clear-cut that they were absolutely proper ! ”
ViaMolecular Biology and Evolution .
AfricaEvolutionHomo sapiensHuman evolutionNeanderthalPaleontologyScience
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