Posted on 11/04/2021 9:18:43 AM PDT by Red Badger
Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia (Cheburgenator/ CC-BY-SA-4.0/Wikimedia Commons)
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Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.
Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn't alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity's prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.
"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 evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.
Up until recently, these occasional sexual partners were thought to include Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010.
But in this study, a third ex from long ago was isolated in Eurasian DNA, thanks to deep learning algorithms sifting through a complex mass of ancient and modern human genetic code.
Using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference, the researchers found evidence of what they call a "third introgression" – a 'ghost' archaic population that modern humans interbred with during the African exodus.
"This population is either related to the Neanderthal-Denisova clade or diverged early from the Denisova lineage," the researchers wrote in their paper, meaning that it's possible this third population in humanity's sexual history was possibly a mix themselves of Neanderthals and Denisovans.
In a sense, from the vantage point of deep learning, it's a hypothetical corroboration of sorts of the teenage girl 'hybrid fossil' identified in 2018; although there's still more work to be done, and the research projects themselves aren't directly linked.
"Our theory coincides with the hybrid specimen discovered recently in Denisova, although as yet we cannot rule out other possibilities", one of the team, genomicist Mayukh Mondal from the University of Tartu in Estonia, said in a press statement at the time of discovery.
That being said, the discoveries being made in this area of science are coming thick and fast.
Also in 2018, another team of researchers identified evidence of what they called a "definite third interbreeding event" alongside Denisovans and Neanderthals, and a pair of papers published in early 2019 traced the timeline of how those extinct species intersected and interbred in clearer detail than ever before.
There's a lot more research to be done here yet. Applying this kind of AI analysis is a decidedly new technique in the field of human ancestry, and the known fossil evidence we're dealing with is amazingly scant.
But according to the research, what the team has found explains not only a long-forgotten process of introgression – it's a dalliance that, in its own way, informs part of who we are today.
"We thought we'd try to find these places of high divergence in the genome, see which are Neanderthal and which are Denisovan, and then see whether these explain the whole picture," Bertranpetit told Smithsonian.
"As it happens, if you subtract the Neanderthal and Denisovan parts, there is still something in the genome that is highly divergent."
The findings were published in Nature Communications.
A version of this article was originally published in February 2019.
I think AI has been reading Genesis
If you’re interested in the details, here’s the original article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08089-7
It is the real thing, not the watered-down version for laymen.
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Thanks. This article was terrible. I learned nothing from it except there is believed to be a “third introgression” as determined by Baysian based AI.
Nothing on actual methods. Just a just-so story.
It is _so_ irritating when all those folks who “followed the science” turned out to be wrong—again!
If THAT is the ghost race then humanity has surely devolved badly. (Isn’t Jerri a pretty lady?)
Did Laz get to her?
Genesis 6:1-4
King James Version
6 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6:1-4
King James Version
6 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Homo Erectus
There is only humans, made in the image of God, and then there are all other animals. There is nothing else.
Just read Genesis 6 and the book of 1 Enoch (not canon, but a book quoted by new testament authors.
Thanks Red Badger.
Sez the story was originally published in 2018.
An Indigenous People In The Philippines Have The Most Denisovan DNA
Ayta people in the Philippines, shown here, belong to a group of ethnic communities that includes one with the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world, a new study finds.Indigenous Ayta Magbukon people get 5 percent of their DNA from the mysterious ancient hominids
Sheep?
the stone age Nancy Pelousian tribe
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