Scientists examining
the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct
human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in
Africa, the latest evidence of humankind’s complicated genetic ancestry.
The study indicated
that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some 2% to 19%,
of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species – what the researchers
called a “ghost population.”
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),
human genetics and computer science professor Sriram Sankararaman, who led the
study published this week in the journal Science Advances said“We estimate interbreeding occurred
approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty,” .
Homo sapiens first
appeared a bit more than 300,000 years ago in Africa and later spread
worldwide, encountering other human species in Eurasia that have since gone
extinct including the Neanderthals and the lesser-known Denisovans.
Previous genetic
research showed that our species interbred with both the Neanderthals and
Denisovans, with modern human populations outside of Africa still carrying DNA
from both. But while there is an ample fossil record of the Neanderthals and a
few fossils of Denisovans, the newly identified “ghost population” is more
enigmatic.
Sankararaman said this
extinct species seems to have diverged roughly 650,000 years ago from the
evolutionary line that led to Homo sapiens, before the evolutionary split
between the lineages that led to our species and to the Neanderthals.
The researchers
examined genomic data from hundreds of West Africans including the Yoruba
people of Nigeria and Benin and the Mende people of Sierra Leone, and then
compared that with Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. They found DNA segments
in the West Africans that could best be explained by ancestral interbreeding
with an unknown member of the human family tree that led to what is called
genetic “introgression.”
It is unclear if West
Africans derived any genetic benefits from this long-ago gene flow.