Early Humans Left Africa Much Earlier Than Previously Thought: Scientists have found evidence of several waves of migration by looking at the genetic signatures of human interbreeding with Neanderthal
Submitted 4 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 4 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Research on the DNA of living people has indicated that early Homo sapiens stayed on the continent for a long while, with a small group leaving just 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world.
In 2010, Svante Paabo, a Swedish geneticist, and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome, reconstructed from 40,000-year-old fossils found in Croatia.
Dr. Paabo’s team also discovered that living, non-African people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, a signature of interbreeding from long ago.
Another group of researchers — led by Joshua Akey, a professor of genomics at Princeton University — tackled the same question with its own statistical method.
Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen who was not involved in the new studies, said that some mysterious human fossils from Europe and the Middle East might belong to these early waves.
In 2019, Dr. Harvati and her colleagues described a skull fragment from Greece dating back over 210,000 years that bears some hallmarks of modern human anatomy.
The original article contains 843 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!