Scientist Svante Pääbo just won a Nobel for his work sequencing the genomes of ancient humans. In 2018, he and his team revealed direct evidence that Neanderthals interbred with other ancient humans 👇
"We then have very direct evidence – almost caught in the act, so to say – of mixing with each other," says Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the research.
He says the discovery of first generation offspring of these two groups was"almost too lucky to be true." Lucky, because scientists have scant physical remains from our distant Denisovan relatives: just two bone fragments and three teeth. Scientists already knew that the two groups had mated with each other at some point in their past – there was a tiny amount of Neanderthal genes in the Denisovan genome they sequenced in 2010. But finding an individual like Denisova 11 suggests that these groups got quite friendly with each other when they did meet.
The findings offer fresh detail for scientists' understanding of the world 90,000 years ago. Neanderthals, Denisovans, and