African Genome Offers New Leads in the Story of Human Evolution

Via IO9:

It’s pretty much an established fact that ancient human beings interbred with their Neanderthal cousins, but according to scientists investigating the African genome, interspecies breeding may have occurred much earlier than we thought:

Their findings suggest humans are more genetically diverse than we’d previously believed. But they also show that ancient humans may have interbred with an unknown species of hominin — what researchers surmise “could have been a sibling species to Neanderthals.

Read more at IO9.

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  • BuzzCoastin

    several thousand years from now
    it will be speculated that the primitive homo sapien sapien
    must have interbred with their species

  • Jesus Borg

    Science Writers often garble shit up, but basically its like this. The most genetic diversity is in Africa. Because that’s the parent population of humans. The farther you get away from Africa, the less genetic diversity there is. Because you are dealing with populations that keep splitting off from a larger one as humans disperse over the globe. Until they get to the tip of South America. 

    So this big  diverse genetic soup stayed in Africa and before the Bantu expansion, it was mostly people resembling the San, Kung, hadza. Short people with big asses basically. So between members of a  little band of people, you would have more genetic diversity than say, all of Europe.

    Its misleading to say that groups like the San are the “oldest” racial group in the World, and the ancestors of everybody else, because like everyone else they made it to the year 2012 (barely) but they aren’t really “older” its just that they stayed relatively the same over time compared to populations that split off from them and displayed various founders effects through genetic isolation. This can be tracked in the mitochondrial DNA.

    So if these remaining pockets of hunter gathers, have unusual genes that other people don’t have it doesn’t neccessarily mean they crossed with ape men, because they should have weird genes compared to everyone else because compared to them, all the rest of us are like the banjo player in the movie “Deliverance”

  • anonymous


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