By Ksenia Kurenysheva
From the discovery of the first Neanderthal bones in 1856, to the creation of the evolutionary timetable, Neanderthals have always been a great point of interest for evolutionists and geneticists, who have spent the last two centuries meticulously developing an accurate timeline of how humans have evolved. However, a new discovery has taken scientists by storm, with researchers scrambling to understand how it fits into the evolutionary timetable.
The discovery, led by Joshua Akey, used the genes of 2,000 living humans, three Neanderthals and a Denisovan to track the genetic flow between the hominin groups over the last quarter-million years. As a quick note, the hominin group consists of modern humans and immediate ancestors (typically extinct).
Through using an AI tool called IBDmix, the investigators found that even those who live extremely far from Neanderthal caves still possess amounts of Neanderthal DNA, which they believe were ‘carried south by voyagers’. This discovery is one of the first to significantly contradict previous genetic data, which suggest that modern humans rarely encountered Neanderthals and Denisovans.
So…why is this such a huge deal? Well, this genetic information can be used to show the approximate time at which Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans began to interbreed, exchange cultural practices and eventually diverge their separate ways. Furthermore, the findings can also be utilised to further understand small changes and events that occurred throughout time, which scientists were unable to classify before.
Lastly, and probably most crucially, this group of researchers were able to discover one more critical fact about the Neanderthal population: it was smaller than initially believed. The population of breeding Neanderthals, previously thought to be 3,400, is now thought to be closer to 2,400 individuals. Thus, evolutionists are now able to get a more accurate picture of the disappearance of Neanderthals, and hopefully, more information about their vanishment will soon be exposed.
