Approximately 6% of the Altai Neanderthal genome was inherited from an ancient lineage of anatomically modern Homo sapiens that migrated from Africa to Eurasia over 250,000 years ago, according to new research led by the University of Pennsylvania.
“We found this reflection of ancient interbreeding where genes flowed from ancient modern humans into Neanderthals,” said co-first author Dr. Alexander Platt, a researcher in the Department of Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania.
“This group of individuals left Africa between 250,000 and 270,000 years ago. They were sort of the cousins to all humans alive today, and they were much more like us than Neanderthals.”
“We arrived at this conclusion by comparing a Neanderthal genome with a diverse set of genomes from modern indigenous populations in sub-Saharan Africa.”
“Our study highlights the importance of including ethnically and geographically diverse populations in human genetics and genomic studies,” said University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Sarah Tishkoff, senior author of the study.
To better understand how widespread Neanderthal-like DNA regions are across sub-Saharan Africa and to elucidate their origins, the researchers analyzed the genomes of 180 individuals from 12 different populations in Cameroon, Botswana, Tanzania, and Ethiopia.
For each genome, they identified regions of Neanderthal-like DNA and looked for evidence of Neanderthal ancestry.
Then, they compared the modern human genomes to a genome belonging to a Neanderthal who lived in the Altai Mountains, Siberia, approximately 120,000 years ago.
For this comparison, the researchers developed a novel statistical method that allowed them to determine the origins of the Neanderthal-like DNA in these modern sub-Saharan populations, whether they were regions that Neanderthals inherited from modern humans or regions that modern humans inherited from Neanderthals and then brought back to Africa.
They found that all of the…
Read the full article here