Author Topic: Southeast Asia was crowded with archaic human groups long before we turned up  (Read 976 times)

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Offline Sanguine

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by João Teixeira, The Conversation

The ancestral population of modern humans appears to have split as it moved across Asia.

Around 55,000-50,000 years ago, a population of modern humans left Africa and started on the long trek that would lead them around the world. After rapidly crossing Eurasia and Southeast Asia, they traveled through the islands of Indonesia, and eventually as far as the continent of Sahul—modern-day Australia and New Guinea.

Their descendants are the modern human populations found right across this enormous region today.

In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we detail how during this remarkable journey the ancestors of modern humans met and genetically mixed with a number of archaic human groups, including Neandertals and Denisovans, and several others for which we currently have no name. The traces of these interactions are still preserved in our genomes....

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-southeast-asia-crowded-archaic-human.html