Scientists examining the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in Africa, the latest evidence of humankind's complicated genetic ancestry.
The study indicated that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some 2% to 19%, of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species – what the researchers called a "ghost population."
"We estimate interbreeding occurred approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty," said University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) human genetics and computer science professor Sriram Sankararaman, who led the study published this week in the journal Science Advances...
Previous genetic research showed that our species interbred with both the Neanderthals and Denisovans, with modern human populations outside of Africa still carrying DNA from both. But while there is an ample fossil record of the Neanderthals and a few fossils of Denisovans, the newly identified "ghost population" is more enigmatic...
Sankararaman said this extinct species seems to have diverged roughly 650,000 years ago from the evolutionary line that led to Homo sapiens, before the evolutionary split between the lineages that led to our species and to the Neanderthals.
The researchers examined genomic data from hundreds of West Africans including the Yoruba people of Nigeria and Benin and the Mende people of Sierra Leone, and then compared that with Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. They found DNA segments in the West Africans that could best be explained by ancestral interbreeding with an unknown member of the human family tree that led to what is called genetic "introgression."Mysterious 'ghost population' of ancient humans discovered in African DNA [02/15/2020]
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“We estimate interbreeding occurred approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty,...”
That phrase just described the sex life of a lot of modern married men.