Until recently, some researchers assumed people of African descent didn’t have Neanderthal ancestry because their predecessors didn’t leave Africa to meet the Neanderthals in Europe and Asia.

Less is known about the Denisovans and their movements, but research suggests modern humans mated with them in Asia and Australia between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago. Apparently, this was no one-night stand- research suggests there were multiple encounters between Neanderthals and modern humans. Modern humans may have mated with Neanderthals after migrating out of Africa and into Europe and Asia around 70,000 years ago. Scientists are still figuring out when all this inter-group mating took place. The human lineage of Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens. DNA analysis revealed that her mother was a Neanderthal and her father was a Denisovan. The most direct evidence of this is the recent discovery of a 13-year-old girl who lived in a cave about 90,000 years ago. But archaeologists have found evidence that they lived and mated with Neanderthals in Siberia for around 100,000 years. “That was a real turning point… It became widely accepted very quickly after that.”Īs a more recently-discovered group, we have far less information on Denisovans than Neanderthals. Rogers, a professor of anthropology and biology at the University of Utah and lead author of the Science Advances paper.

“When the Max Plank Institute began getting nuclear DNA sequenced data from Neanderthals, then it became very clear very quickly that modern humans carried some Neanderthal DNA,” says Alan R. Since then, researchers have discovered Neanderthals and Denisovans not only mated with each other, they also mated with modern humans. WATCH NOW Early Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans Mixed It UpĪfter the superarchaic humans came the archaic ones: Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human groups that no longer exist.Īrchaeologists have known about Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis, since the 19th century, but only discovered Denisovans in 2008 (the group is so new it doesn’t have a scientific name yet). This marks the earliest known instance of human groups mating with each other-something we know happened a lot more later on. These superarchaic humans mated with the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, according to a paper published in Science Advances in February 2020.

In addition to these early humans, researchers have found evidence of an unknown “superarchaic” group that separated from other humans in Africa around two million years ago. Others include Homo rudolfensis, who lived in Eastern Africa about 1.9 million to 1.8 million years ago (its name comes from its discovery in East Rudolph, Kenya) and Homo erectus, the “upright man” who ranged from Southern Africa all the way to modern-day China and Indonesia from about 1.89 million to 110,000 years ago. One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa. Scientists still don’t know exactly when or how the first humans evolved, but they’ve identified a few of the oldest ones. Homo habilis individuals chip away at rocks, sharpening them for cutting up game or scraping hides while a woman, with her child, gathers wild berries to eat and branches to make shelters.įirst things first: A “human” is anyone who belongs to the genus Homo (Latin for “man”).

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