The human family tree just got another — mysterious — branch, an African “sister species” to the heavy-browed Neanderthals that once roamed Europe. While no fossilized bones have been found from these enigmatic people, they did leave a calling card in present-day Africans: Snippets of DNA foreign to present-day humans. There’s only way one that genetic material could have made it into modern human populations. “Geneticists like euphemisms, but we’re talking about sex,” said Joshua Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, whose lab identified the foreign DNA in three groups of modern Africans.
View the original article here: Early Africans mated with mystery species of humans
