New Scientist reopens that old, old scandal between we modern humans and our sexy, sexy Neanderthal cousins:
Instead, a team led by Jeffrey Long, at the University of New Mexico, found evidence that some of the [genetic] markers looked far too old to have come from humans. Inbreeding with other ancient species is the likeliest explanation. “It means Neanderthals didn’t completely disappear,” he told Nature.
True, Neanderthals are the likeliest contenders for our ancestors’ sexual partners, but they aren’t the only ones.
Last month, a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany recovered hominin DNA in Mongolia from a 30-50,000-year-old finger bone that appears to be neither Neanderthal nor human. Its ancestors, or another yet-to-be-discovered kind of archaic hominin, could have bred with humans.