Sharing work for which he was just awarded a Nobel Prize, geneticist Svante Pääbo shows the DNA proof that early Homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals after we moved out of Africa.
Our Homo sapiens ancestors shared the world with Neanderthals, Denisovans and other types of humans whose DNA lives on in our genes. Unearthing those extinct genomes has profound practical and philosophical implications.
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Human evolution was a complex process with many human species living and interbreeding at the same time. This emerging narrative, which challenges the old theory of human evolution as a linear march of progress, was bolstered by three new studies.
Count your neurons when you count your blessings
For nearly a decade, researchers have puzzled over what the Denisovans looked like. Now, we have our best model yet of the species' skeleton.
This is the second species of diminutive human to be found in south-east Asia. Both species lived around 50,000 years ago, at a time when Asia was also home to our species, the Neanderthals and a group called the Denisovans. The new species raises many questions, including who were its ancestors and how did it move?
In past research, apes consistently failed on tasks designed to assess their understanding of others’ false beliefs. They did’t seem to know when someone has an idea about the world that conflicts with reality. But in a new study involving 40 bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans the apes were able to anticipate that an actor would behave in accordance with a false belief.
For the first time, a complete DNA sequence from Africa dating back thousands of years has been recovered. The DNA of this Ethiopian man sheds new light on the movement out of Africa, and also movement of Eurasians back into Africa.
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