50k Year Old Girl Found to be 1/2 Neaderthal and 1/2 Denisovan

Awesome news! Even a full skeleton would have started a decades-long, unsolvable theoretical debate if it had been discovered just 15-20 years ago.

That said, I'm kind of surprised we haven't learned even more about Denisovans by now.
 
It's the opposite: Neanderthal mother + Denisovan father.

Anyway, it's an amazing discovery, especially because it's a 1st generation (!!!) hybrid of the two species. Given how very few Neanderthal/Denisovan Eurasian hominins have had their DNA analyzed, it's amazing that they could already find a 1st generation hybrid, and the Denisovan father also bears some traces of older Neanderthal ancestry, also indicating some admixture in the past. That may all be just a coincidence, but it's highly likely that it really indicates that hominins really mixed in a non-sporadic way (including us humans not just with Neanderthals and Denisovans, but even way back still in Africa, the increasingly likely multiregional yet intra-African origin of humankind).
 
From Iosif Lazaridis:

"[FONT=&quot]The Neandertal-Denisova split is dated to ~420 thousand years ago in the new Slon et al. paper, but this must've been earlier as the ~430 thousand year old Sima de los Huesos autosomal sequences were already on the Neandertal side of the split (Meyer et al. 2016)[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
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This is amazing! But i dont really understand the article, what is the datation of the bone fragment? " The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe " I dont understand that sentence, do they mean that the split between Denisovans and Neanderthals happened near the Altai and that only after Neanderthals migrate to Europe? This could change a lot of things on our perception about Neanderthals, especially taking account of Heidelbergensis.
 
It's the opposite: Neanderthal mother + Denisovan father.

Anyway, it's an amazing discovery, especially because it's a 1st generation (!!!) hybrid of the two species. Given how very few Neanderthal/Denisovan Eurasian hominins have had their DNA analyzed, it's amazing that they could already find a 1st generation hybrid, and the Denisovan father also bears some traces of older Neanderthal ancestry, also indicating some admixture in the past. That may all be just a coincidence, but it's highly likely that it really indicates that hominins really mixed in a non-sporadic way (including us humans not just with Neanderthals and Denisovans, but even way back still in Africa, the increasingly likely multiregional yet intra-African origin of humankind).
Knowing human nature it was always most likely scenario to me. We are lucky we can't have offspring with sheep. ;)
Anyway, we are a product of constant mixing and remixing. If only it was known by dudes who wrote the bible....

It seems like this mentioned encounter happened in last warm period before present one. Similar to modern people who have spread and mixed after last ice age gone away. Ice Age shrinks and separates, Warm Period expands and mixes populations.
 
Knowing human nature it was always most likely scenario to me. We are lucky we can't have offspring with sheep. ;)
Anyway, we are a product of constant mixing and remixing. If only it was known by dudes who wrote the bible....

It seems like this mentioned encounter happened in last warm period before present one. Similar to modern people who have spread and mixed after last ice age gone away. Ice Age shrinks and separates, Warm Period expands and mixes populations.

We share that view of human nature.:)

In the case of these groups, however, the populations were so small and isolated that the groups remained largely distinct. It was only in the few instances where they came into contact with one another that there was mixing.

Also, it took a long time for the EEF and the WHG to admix, a thousand years or more if I remember correctly. That may have had a lot to do with very different life styles.

Religion also keeps people apart, i.e. Druze, Christian Arabs, Assyrian Christians in the Middle East.

I've always been a bit surprised how separate the German communities in Eastern Europe remained.

Perhaps the most mixing occurred with predominately male migrations or invasions with the local women, for obvious reasons.
 
We share that view of human nature.:)

In the case of these groups, however, the populations were so small and isolated that the groups remained largely distinct. It was only in the few instances where they came into contact with one another that there was mixing.

Also, it took a long time for the EEF and the WHG to admix, a thousand years or more if I remember correctly. That may have had a lot to do with very different life styles.

Religion also keeps people apart, i.e. Druze, Christian Arabs, Assyrian Christians in the Middle East.

I've always been a bit surprised how separate the German communities in Eastern Europe remained.

Perhaps the most mixing occurred with predominately male migrations or invasions with the local women, for obvious reasons.

yes, there is a +/- 10.000 year overlap between Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe
but apart from the outlier Oase I, no indications of admixture in Europe have been found
 
I must be part of this ancient mix ..........more than 1 company gave me these figures !!!!
.
 
From Iosif Lazaridis:

"The Neandertal-Denisova split is dated to ~420 thousand years ago in the new Slon et al. paper, but this must've been earlier as the ~430 thousand year old Sima de los Huesos autosomal sequences were already on the Neandertal side of the split (Meyer et al. 2016)



Good point. I've often doubted Neanderthals and Denisovans would've split from each other as late as ~430,000 kya. I mean, even some 100% modern human populations, like the least admixed Khoisan, diverged from other parts of humankind ~200,000 kya - and still they are virtually identical to other Homo sapiens sapiens. Neanderthals and Denisovans would've been more similar to each if they had diverged only ~300-350k years before the genetic samples that have been analyzed.
 
Good point. I've often doubted Neanderthals and Denisovans would've split from each other as late as ~430,000 kya. I mean, even some 100% modern human populations, like the least admixed Khoisan, diverged from other parts of humankind ~200,000 kya - and still they are virtually identical to other Homo sapiens sapiens. Neanderthals and Denisovans would've been more similar to each if they had diverged only ~300-350k years before the genetic samples that have been analyzed.

I've always sort of wondered this. I don't think Denisovans and Neanderthals are much further apart on a PCA than the most separated human populations.
 
Good point. I've often doubted Neanderthals and Denisovans would've split from each other as late as ~430,000 kya. I mean, even some 100% modern human populations, like the least admixed Khoisan, diverged from other parts of humankind ~200,000 kya - and still they are virtually identical to other Homo sapiens sapiens. Neanderthals and Denisovans would've been more similar to each if they had diverged only ~300-350k years before the genetic samples that have been analyzed.

I've always sort of wondered this. I don't think Denisovans and Neanderthals are much further apart on a PCA than the most separated human populations.

This paper, which I am not allowed to link until I have ten posts, from a year ago uses an expanded data set, and finds a much deeper divergence point. Somewhere between 620 to 750 000 years for humans and Neanderthals, and 300 generations less for Neanderthals and Denisovans. Low or high estimates depend on which mutation rate you prefer. There is some pushback, but I got to say the deeper divergence feels intuitively right to me. It also seems to me that this would make the first expansion of the pre- Neanderthal/Denisovan species coincide neatly with the appearance of Abbervillian/middle Acheulian stone tools. Rather than the Mousterian.

Paper at: pnas.org/content/early/2017/08/01/1706426114

PS: Hi, I'm new.
 
We share that view of human nature.:)

In the case of these groups, however, the populations were so small and isolated that the groups remained largely distinct. It was only in the few instances where they came into contact with one another that there was mixing.

Also, it took a long time for the EEF and the WHG to admix, a thousand years or more if I remember correctly. That may have had a lot to do with very different life styles.

Religion also keeps people apart, i.e. Druze, Christian Arabs, Assyrian Christians in the Middle East.

I've always been a bit surprised how separate the German communities in Eastern Europe remained.

Perhaps the most mixing occurred with predominately male migrations or invasions with the local women, for obvious reasons.

i don't think that mixing, how many think about it, is not really human nature. and if it is then not-mixing is also part of human nature. wasn't there a study with the result that humans tend to like faces that have similar features as the faces of their parents? i also think that this has to do with your own opinion about the attractivness of yourself. my theory is that this is a mechanism to prevent or at least slow mixing down because mixing is biologically not beneficial per se. for example if there is a population living under certain circumstances and they meet another population, that maybe just have recently imigrated, it could destroy possible adaptions or other beneficial traits if both populations would mix too fast.
 
Ailchu,

We're not talking about 20-21st century "romantic love" here, or searching for a committed partner.

It's my considered opinion that men will mate with just about anyone given the opportunity. A silly example just occurred to me. Given his wealth and fame, Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly had access to a lot of very attractive women. His wife was also attractive. He had sex and a child with their extremely, imo, unattractive nanny. Get my point?

Why did Anglo-Saxon white Americans sire so many children with their African slaves, or Portuguese and Spanish Latin Americans with Indian and African women, or the French in Canada with Indian women? The answer is: because they could. That happened even with their European wives in the house. Meanwhile, given that older men in many established societies had the wealth and more than their fair share of the women, many migrations throughout history were of young men seeking land, wealth etc., with foreseeable consequences.

Even in established societies, some people are attracted to "exotic" looking people by their local standards. For goodness' sakes, in the summers when I used to be in Italy, the damn train doors would open and streams of Scandinavian and German and British young women would pour out. They weren't all rushing to sightsee in museums and churches. Nowadays men can go on sex tours of Cambodia and Thailand. Why?
 

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