Neanderthals and Denisovans were archaic human populations that branched off from the modern lineage early in the Middle Pleistocene, approximately 750,000 years ago, and then separated from each other around 390,000 years ago. Many modern humans carry DNA derived from these archaic populations due to interbreeding during the Late Pleistocene, a period spanning 126,000 to 12,000 years ago (Slon et al. 2018). DNA evidence has dramatically expanded our knowledge of the human evolutionary tree. Since the discovery that genetic material could be recovered from ancient organisms in 1984 (Higuchi et al. 1984), the study of ancient DNA (aDNA) has advanced rapidly. Certain factors can complicate the collection and analysis of aDNA, such as advanced age, the surrounding environment, and the collection technique, which can lead to degradation via cross-linking, deamination of cytosine, and fragmentation, as well as contamination due to extraneous microbial DNA and exposure to modern human DNA during extraction. Despite these difficulties, the revelation that archaic DNA can be sequenced, in conjunction with the sequencing of the human genome less than twenty years later (2001), provided the foundation from which the field of human evolutionary genomics arose. In just the last decade, genomes have been recovered from Neanderthals and Denisovans. This has resulted in the determination that Neanderthals account for between 1% and 4% of the ancestry of people outside sub-Saharan Africa (Green et al. 2010), and Denisovans contribute from 1% to 6% of the ancestry of people in island Southeast Asia and Oceania (Meyer et al. 2012). These genomes provide information about the phenotypes of archaic peoples, insight into interactions between them and modern humans, and evidence of their contribution to the biology of modern humans.
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