"About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations," explained Jaume Bertranpetit, principal investigator at the IBE. Now, investigators of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), and the University of Tartu have used deep learning algorithms to identify a new and hitherto-unknown ancestor of humans that would have interbred with modern humans tens of thousands of years ago. Current human DNA blurs the lines of these limits, preserving fragments of hominids from other species, such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, who coexisted with modern humans more than 40,000 years ago in Eurasia. It gets more complex when extinct species are involved. One rule of thumb for distinguishing between two species is that while both of them may cross breed, they do not generally produce fertile descendants. Humans had descendants with n species that is unknown to us This finding would explain that the hybrid found this summer in the caves of Denisova - the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father - was not an isolated case, but rather was part of a more general introgression process.
Modern human DNA computational analysis suggests that the extinct species was a hybrid of Neanderthals and Denisovans and cross bred with "Out of Africa" modern humans in Asia. Image Credit: Brett Eloff.A recent study using deep learning algorithms and statistical methods discovered the footprint of a new hominid who cross bred with the ancestors of Asiatic individuals tens of thousands of years ago. The research was published in the journal PaleoAnthropology. Some researchers had argued that the fossils were actually more than one species due to varying sizes and shapes of vertebrae.īut according to co-author Scott Williams of New York University, “the differences in these vertebrae can simply be attributed to their developmental age differences: the juvenile individual’s vertebrae have not yet completed growth, whereas the adult’s vertebra growth is complete.” Instead, what we’re witnessing here are parallel lineages, illustrating how different hominin experiments were unfolding early in our complex evolutionary history.” But, for others, like the foot, it is not. “For some anatomies of Australopithecus sediba, like the knee, that is true. It was once thought that a fossil species a million years younger than Lucy would surely look more human-like,” De Silva explained. “Our findings challenge a traditional, linear view of evolution. “The anatomies we are seeing in Australopithecus sediba are forcing us to reassess the pathway by which we became human,” said Jeremy DeSilva, associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College and co-author of the study. This places the species in the human family tree between upright apes who lived 3 million years ago and Homo habilis who lived 1.5 to 2.1 million years ago. Scientists identified the new “family tree member” Australopithecus sediba using fossils that were actually found 10 years ago at a site in Malapa, South Africa, known as the “Cradle of Humankind.” But until now, it had not been clear whether or not the fossils belonged to an already known species.īut now, researchers have confirmed that Australopithecus sediba were a separate species that lived 1.95 to 1.78 million years ago.
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