Guess what? It looks like humans and Neanderthals were getting cozy with each other way more often and way earlier than we thought!
The brainiacs at the National Human Genome Research Institute tell us that our genome, which is split into 23 pairs of chromosomes in the cell nucleus and one more in the mitochondria, packs everything we need to grow up and function.
Flashback to 2010: researchers started snooping around the human genome and bam! They found bits of Neanderthal DNA hanging out in there, according to IFL Science.
The hot gossip was that our ancient ancestors had some romantic entanglements with Neanderthals, and boy, does the latest scoop support that!
A fresh-off-the-press paper in Science magazine shares that when researchers took another look at how much human DNA popped up in the Neanderthal genome, they were shook—up to 10% of it was modern human!
Joshua Akey, a geneticist from Princeton University leading this groundbreaking study, and his team dug through 2,000 modern human genomes and some ancient ones to trace back the love story over 200,000 years.
They found evidence of humans and Neanderthals making babies between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago, then again around 105,000 to 120,000 years ago, and one more round about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
Turns out, our ancestors left Africa and headed to Europe not just for sightseeing but also for some cross-species romance, more often than we ever imagined, Akey explains.
“We now know that for the vast majority of human history, we’ve had a history of contact between modern humans and Neanderthals.
“To me, this story is about dispersal, that modern humans have been moving around and encountering Neanderthals and Denisovans much more than we previously recognized.”
Diving deep into the genetic flow of the past 200,000 years, researchers discovered that 2.5-3.7 percent of human ancestry is chillin’ in Neanderthal DNA.
So, about 200,000 years ago, humans strutted into Europe, hooked up with some Neanderthals, and it looks like their genetic legacy got pretty cozy in the Neanderthal gene pool.
“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” remarked Liming Li, a professor at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.
You can read the newly published study on gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans here.