Neanderthals May Be “Same Species” As Us
At ScienceAlert, David Nield Reports on a new study from the University of Padua:
Our species is defined by a long list of cultural and genetic traits that set us apart from our ancient counterparts.
New research suggests at least some key distinctions date back earlier than previously estimated, hinting that modern and archaic humans — including our close, extinct relatives — have more in common than we ever thought.
“Our results point to a scenario where Modern and Archaic should be regarded as populations of an otherwise common human species, which independently accumulated mutations and cultural innovations,” writes a team of researchers led by biologist Luca Pagani from the University of Padova in Italy.
“Archaic Humans Might Actually Be The Same Species as Us, Study Suggests,” January 7, 2025
Or, as Justin Jackson puts it at Phys.org, “Findings challenge traditional models that attribute certain genetic innovations exclusively to modern Homo sapiens. Similarities observed in both modern and archaic human genomes suggest many hallmarks of the Homo sapiens genetic landscape arose before the lineages split.”
Coalescence Analyses and Molecular Clock Assessments
Specifically, the abstract of the open-access preprint reads,
Homo sapiens diverged from its ancestors in fundamental ways, reflected in recent genomic acquisitions like the PAR2-Y chromosome translocation. Here we show that despite morphological and cultural differences between modern and archaic humans, these human groups share these recent acquisitions. Our modern lineage shows recent functional variants in only 56 genes, of which 24 are linked to brain functions and skull morphology.
Luca Pagani et al., Partitioning the genomic journey to becoming Homo sapiens, bioRxiv (2024)
Using coalescence analyses and molecular clock assessments, the researchers reconstructed a timeline of genetic events, according to which a population bottleneck of humans occurred about 900,000 years ago. Then modern humans diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 650,000 years ago. And they also mingled again about 350,000 years ago.
This version of human history counters the usual tendency to keep Neanderthals and Denisovans separate from modern humans — most likely because in an evolution-based scheme, someone must be the subhuman.
And now who will researchers draft for that role?
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