While Neanderthals and modern humans lived together in Europe for only a relatively short time, two separate studies found inter-species breeding took place from around 50,000 years ago.
A pair of studies analysed samples of modern human and Neanderthal DNA spanning 50,000 years of human history to discover when the two groups bred.
The two species overlapped for only a few thousand years before the Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago. But when did this interbreeding happen? Did the two groups mate throughout their shared history? Or was their rendezvous cut short?Our ancestors left Africa some 70,000 years ago, but it took them thousands of years to make it to Europe or Asia. A DNA study may shed light on where they ended up.
"It is super exciting that we can look into the past and reconstruct a timeline of what our ancestors were doing 50,000 years ago with such resolution," one of the researchers, Priya Moorjani from the University of California, Berkeley, said.Thousands of years later, humans have retained some of these Neanderthal genes — they've not been bred out — which suggests they must be beneficial to us, Dr Llamas said.
"To our surprise, we discovered a fifth- or sixth-degree genetic relationship between Zlatý kůň and two individuals from Ranis," Arev Sümer, lead author of the study and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said in a press release.genomes so far sequenced.
Neanderthals Ranis Zlaty Kun Genomes Homo Sapiens Human Evolution Genetics DNA Neandertals
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