There have been some new studies done that present the strong possibility that Neanderthal and other early human populations, from all over the globe, interbred quite a bit. With genetic analysis and archeological finds, the picture of our species’ evolutionary history becomes more and more complex.
“As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding,” says Sergi Castellano, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team discovered the latest example, which they believe occurred around 100,000 years ago, by analysing traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a Neanderthal genome extracted from a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia.
“There is this joke in the population genetics community — there’s always one more interbreeding event," Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA.
Nature has put together this easy-to-follow map:
The good news is that it’s not just humans sleeping around. Neanderthals loved to sleep around as did Denisovans. No word on whether or not the history of the Earth is 6,000 years old, but I’m sure that evidence will come to light sooner or later.