New fossil finds and technological breakthroughs in collecting and decoding ancient DNA are re-writing the history of human evolution, often with shocking and surprising results. As developments continue apace, what could be uncovered next?
“Ours, it turns out, is a repeated history of migrations and mixing,” says Cosimo Posth, a junior professor of archaeo- and palaeogenetics at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Much of what we thought we knew about human history – that populations lived for centuries mostly without mixing – was overturned thanks to modern-day genomics.”
By 2010, off the back of advances in genome sequencing for healthcare and medicine, Pääbo drafted a whole genome of a Neanderthal. This, and subsequent work, demonstrated – rather shockingly – that Neanderthals and other extinct hominids made a significant contribution to our ancestry.
In other words, Homo sapiens did interbreed with other species living at the time and humans have inherited about 2 per cent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
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Other discoveries and revelations followed: that of a previously unrecognised kind of human, the Denisovans, from a whole genome recovered from a finger bone fragment found in a Siberian cave. That the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe was 150,000 years earlier than previously understood was confirmed by the dating of a fossil found in Greece in 2019.
