{"id":1407,"date":"2026-03-31T20:56:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T20:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/?p=1407"},"modified":"2026-03-31T20:56:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T20:56:35","slug":"prehistoric-humans-may-have-interbred-with-two-separate-superarchaic-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/?p=1407","title":{"rendered":"Prehistoric Humans May Have Interbred With Two Separate \u201cSuperarchaic\u201d Species"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

t turns out that we might actually be only 80 percent \u201chuman\u201d, as around a fifth of our DNA seems to have been donated to us by a mysterious hominin that diverged from our own lineage more than a million years ago. At some point before our ancestors left Africa, they interbred with this unknown species, contributing to a long and complicated series of affairs between separate hominin lineages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The culprit in this case is referred to as \u201csuperarchaic\u201d because it separated from the modern human clade before we split from our closest \u201carchaic\u201d relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Recent genetic research has hinted at interbreeding between a superarchaic population and the African ancestors of all Homo sapiens<\/em>, while it has also been shown that superarchaic hominins<\/a> mated with the Eurasian ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, before later hooking up with Denisovans themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, there remains some uncertainty over whether these admixture events all involved the same superarchaic population, or if multiple lovers were on the scene. Hoping to provide some clarity, researchers analyzed the distribution of genetic variants between modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans in order to determine how much of their ancestry was shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their findings \u2013 which have not yet been peer reviewed \u2013 indicate that two separate superarchaic populations took part in these prehistoric rendezvous. And while the researchers can\u2019t say exactly when these episodes occurred, they were able to show that the hominin that interbred with European archaics diverged from the human lineage earlier than the species that mated with the ancestors of modern humans in Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cTwenty percent is just a huge fraction,\u201d said study author Professor Alan Rogers<\/a> from the University of Utah. \u201cWhen you get numbers like a 20-80 split, that’s more like a merger of two populations than a little bit of gene flow into an existing population,\u201d he told IFLScience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s like modern humans are some kind of mosaic. They’re just a combination of two ancestries, neither of which was a small component of the total.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The big question, of course, concerns the identity of these superarchaic contributors. Offering a hypothesis, the researchers note that Homo erectus<\/em> first left Africa<\/a> and spread across Eurasia around two million years ago, before the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans embarked on their own Out-of-Africa expansion some 700,000 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThose guys would have encountered the descendants of the original Out of Africa [group],\u201d said Rogers. \u201cSo we think there was interbreeding between the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans and these Homo erectus<\/em><\/a> descendants in Eurasia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the superarchaic population that seduced our own ancestors, all we know is that this hominin diverged from our lineage about 1.3 million years ago, and that the interbreeding occurred before the split between modern Africans and Europeans. Beyond that, however, Rogers said \u201cthere are no suspects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A preprint version of the study is posted to\u00a0bioRxiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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t turns out that we might actually be only 80 percent \u201chuman\u201d, as around a fifth of our DNA seems to have been donated to us by a mysterious hominin… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"views":84,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1414,"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions\/1414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvibee.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}