The following is an edited excerpt.
For decades scientists have debated exactly how H. sapiens originated and came to be the last human species standing. Thanks in large part to genetic studies in the 1980s, one theory emerged as the clear front-runner. In this view, anatomically modern humans arose in Africa and spread out across the rest of the Old World, completely replacing the existing archaic groups…. However it happened, the newcomers seemed to have eliminated their competitors without interbreeding with them.
This recent African Replacement model, as it is known, has essentially served as the modern human origins paradigm for the past 25 years. Yet mounting evidence indicates that it is wrong. Recent advances in DNA-sequencing technology have enabled researchers to dramatically scale up data collection from living people as well as from extinct species. Analyses of these data with increasingly sophisticated computational tools indicate that the story of our family history is not as simple as most experts thought.
Read the full article here: Sex with Other Human Species Might Have Been Secret of Homo Sapiens’s Success
