Archaic African Lineage Divergence Doesnt Make Africans Different Species

But Wall and others warn their methods cannot rule out that the "ghosts" could be one or several groups of modern humans in Africa that were separated from other moderns for so long that their genes looked "archaic" when the groups finally came together again and mixed. "Our understanding of African population history, in particular, is so far behind," says Joshua Akey of Princeton University. Even if they differ on particulars, the studies emphasize that long after new lineages of humans emerge, they still can mix with others quite different from themselves. Other species, such as cave bears and mammoths, show the same pattern of divergence and later mixing, says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute in London.

A number of previous studies have ... ancient African genomes have revealed that stone-age hunter-gatherers from South Africa diverged from other modern-day populations >260,000 years (31) B.P....

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While introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans has been documented in modern humans outside Africa, the contribution of archaic hominins to the genetic variation of present-day Africans remains poorly understood. We provide complementary lines of evidence for archaic introgression into four West African populations.

While introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans has been documented in modern humans outside Africa, the contribution of archaic hominins to the genetic variation of … ... The Scientist SEPT. 1, 2020 · Africa's sparse fossil record alone cannot reveal our species' evolutionary history. The New York Times FEB. 12, 2020 · Genes in some living West Africans shed light on human genetic diversity, which has been difficult to find in the continent’s fossil record.

If you’re looking for Sriram Sankararaman, chances are he’s absorbed in a screen, examining the genetic markers of a small group of hitherto unknown early humans who lived in West Africa some 600,000 years ago.

“We don’t need reference DNA from fossils of the archaic hominin to confirm that, somewhere deep in our ancestry, humans intermixed with them,” Sankararaman said.

He’s referring to a type of ancient hominin that, while a relative of homo sapiens, was a very different type of human from us. Genetic “chunks” light up Sankararaman’s computer screen at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He calls these genetic elements “ghosts,” because until now, the archaic people with whom they originated have been invisible to scholars of human evolution.

They found DNA segments in the West Africans that could best be explained by ancestral interbreeding with an unknown member of the human family tree that led to what is called genetic "introgression."