Scientists find evidence of 'ghost population' of ancient humans

Source: The Guardian

Scientists find evidence of 'ghost population' of ancient humans

Traces of unknown ancestor emerged when researchers analysed genomes from west African populations

Ian Sample Science editor
@iansample
Wed 12 Feb 2020 19.00 GMT
Last modified on Wed 12 Feb 2020 20.25 GMT

Scientists have found evidence for a mysterious “ghost population” of ancient humans that lived in Africa about half a million years ago and whose genes live on in people today.

Traces of the unknown ancestor emerged when researchers analysed genomes from west African populations and found that up to a fifth of their DNA appeared to have come from the missing relatives.

Geneticists suspect that the ancestors of modern west Africans interbred with the yet-to-be-discovered archaic humans tens of thousands of years ago, much as ancient Europeans once mated with Neanderthals.

“In the west Africans we looked at, all have ancestry from this unknown archaic population,” said Sriram Sankararaman, a computational biologist who led the research at the University of California in Los Angeles.

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The findings are far from definitive, but according to the scientists’ best estimates, the ghost population split from the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans between 360,000 and 1m years ago. The group of perhaps 20,000 individuals then bred with the ancestors of modern west Africans at some point in the past 124,000 years.

But other explanations are possible, Sankararaman said. ...

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/12/scientists-find-evidence-of-ghost-population-of-ancient-humans