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General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Topic started by: rangerrebew on January 19, 2019, 02:52:48 pm

Title: AI Predicts Humans Have an Ancestor We Don't Even Know About Yet
Post by: rangerrebew on January 19, 2019, 02:52:48 pm
AI Predicts Humans Have an Ancestor We Don't Even Know About Yet

Neanderthals and their Denisovan cousins likely formed a new species, an A.I. says. That muddies human evolution even further.
 
By David Grossman   
Jan 17, 2019
 

Using artificial intelligence, a number of European evolutionary biologists now believe that humans have an ancient ancestor whose identity is unknown to modern science. The ancestor, based out of Asia, would have been a hybrid of Neanderthals and Denisovans, a subspecies of archaic humans.

The Denisovans are less well-known than the famous Neanderthals, but the two were separate groups who split off from their common ancestor around 744,000 years ago. While Neanderthals settled in Europe and parts of western Asia, Denisovan remains have been found in central Asia and Siberia—their name comes from the Denisova Cave in the Siberian Altai Mountains, where a Denisovan bone was first discovered in 2008.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a25934309/ai-study-human-ancestor/ (https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a25934309/ai-study-human-ancestor/)