Researchers believe they have discovered the date of the first sexual encounter of our ancestors “Homo Sapiens” outside Africa, about 300 thousand years ago, having fathered children with the Neanderthals, who lived in the area that currently corresponds to Europe.
A team of international researchers analyzed the remains of three Neanderthals, including the skull of a baby who died in Russia 44,000 years ago and a teenager of the same ancestor species as today’s humans that was prevalent in Europe, found in the Asturian cave of El Sidron , in Spain, who died 49,000 years ago.
The researchers focused on male remains because they wanted to analyze the Y chromosome, the genetic mark of paternity that passes from parents to children. They intended to understand who had children with whom: whether it was the burly Neanderthal males who joined the Sapiens females, whether the elegant Sapiens males who sought out Neanderthal females to have children.
The results, published in the magazine “Sapiens”, revealed a new chapter of the crossing between Sapiens and Neanderthals, now extinct, that happened about 300 thousand years ago.
It is the oldest cross between species of which there is knowledge, having happened even before our species is what it is, because Homo Sapiens itself appeared about 200 thousand years ago, approximately 100 thousand years after this “first encounter” sexual “between two of the three species of hominids that inhabited the earth 300,000 years ago.
Carles Lalueza-Fox, geneticist and co-author of the study, believes that the evidence of this crossing, marked on the Y chromosome, proves that there was migration out of Africa of the ancestors of Homo Sapiens, who met the Neanderthals in an unidentified place.
“It is impossible to know where it happened, but the most plausible thing is that it was in the Middle East or, less likely, in the Balkans,” argues Antonio Rosa, another co-author of the study, cited by the Spanish newspaper “El País”.
The research, centered on the Y chromosome, shows that males and females of both species, Sapiens and Neanderthals participated in this meeting, but that left a permanent mark on the species that predominated in Europe at that time: the Y chromosome of the Neanderthals was replaced by those of the Sapien , possibly because the Neanderthals were much less, about 10,000 at that time.
Another previous study had already demonstrated that the maternal genetic mark of Neanderthals – the mitochondrial genome that passes from mothers to children – was Sapiens, meaning that a cross between species left the mark of the Sapiens females in Neanderthals.
Researchers place this crossing on a date identical to that of Sapiens males with Neanderthal females, 300,000 years ago. Most likely, it all happened at the same meeting, admits Mikkel Schierup, a researcher at the University of Aaruhs in Denmark.
In this meeting now identified by scientists, and seen as the first cross between species outside Africa, it was the Sapiens who passed the genes on to the Neanderthals, the opposite of what happened about 50 thousand years ago, when the opposite happened.
This new study updates and tangles our family tree. Considering only the parents ‘sex chromosomes and the mothers’ mitochondrial genome, Sapiens and Neanderthals are the closest relatives. Analyzing the rest of the non-sexual DNA, Neanderthals are closer to the Denisovans, a mysterious people who lived in Asia, at a time when the land was inhabited by six different species of hominids.
Analysis of previous studies has shown that the three most known species, Neanderthals, Sapiens and Denisovanos, met at various times in history and had children among them. Until this new study, Sapiens and Neanderthals were thought to have crossed twice, once about 100,000 years ago, possibly in the Middle East, and once 50,000 years ago.
From these meetings, mixed-race children were born, who, according to the researchers, were well received by the tribes and raised as if they were their own species. They grew, multiplied over thousands of years, to the point that today there is only one species of man, Sapiens.
As a result of these encounters between the three species, thousands of years ago, many modern humans have a percentage of Neanderthal DNA and, to a lesser extent, Denisovano.
Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct thousands of years ago, but somehow they are still alive among us. All humans outside Africa have about 2% of active Neanderthal DNA in each of their cells. Some Sapiens from Australia and New Guinea have a dash of Denisovan DNA.
Furthermore, some people in Africa and India have DNA marks of “ghost people”, human species to be identified, but whose mark remains on humans today thousands of years later.
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