Early Africans mated with 'sister species' of Neanderthals (scan, function)

[uggabugga]

The human family tree just got another — mysterious — branch, an African “sister species” to the heavy-browed Neanderthals that once roamed Europe.

While no fossilized bones have been found from these enigmatic people, they did leave a calling card in present-day Africans: Snippets of DNA foreign to present-day humans.

These genetic leftovers do not resemble DNA from any modern-day humans. The foreign DNA also does not resemble Neanderthal DNA, which shows up in the DNA of some modern-day Europeans, Akey said. That means the newly identified DNA came from an unknown group.

“We’re calling this a Neanderthal sibling species in Africa,” Akey said. He added that the interbreeding likely occurred 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, long after some modern humans had walked out of Africa to colonize Asia and Europe, and around the same time Neanderthals were waning in Europe.
Early Africans mated with mystery species of humans - The Washington Post

here's the abstract from Cell:

Evolutionary History and Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole-Genome Sequences of Diverse African Hunter-Gatherers
Highlights
► 13.4 million variants identified in African hunter-gatherers, many of which are novel ► Evidence of archaic admixture found in the genomes of African hunter-gatherers ► Selection scans implicate loci involved in taste perception, metabolism, and immunity ► Genetic associations with height are found for Pygmy variants located on chromosome 3

Summary

To reconstruct modern human evolutionary history and identify loci that have shaped hunter-gatherer adaptation, we sequenced the whole genomes of five individuals in each of three different hunter-gatherer populations at >60 coverage: Pygmies from Cameroon and Khoesan-speaking Hadza and Sandawe from Tanzania. We identify 13.4 million variants, substantially increasing the set of known human variation. We found evidence of archaic introgression in all three populations, and the distribution of time to most recent common ancestors from these regions is similar to that observed for introgressed regions in Europeans. Additionally, we identify numerous loci that harbor signatures of local adaptation, including genes involved in immunity, metabolism, olfactory and taste perception, reproduction, and wound healing. Within the Pygmy population, we identify multiple highly differentiated loci that play a role in growth and anterior pituitary function and are associated with height.

[Six Foot Three]

Just totally speculating here however maybe they're somewhat related to Homo Floriensis ''Hobbit'' people who were alive in Indonesia during the time of Homo Sapiens 94,000 BCE - 12,000 as maybe they were at one time African Pygmies who ventured eastward by sea?

[ovcatto]

Sort of makes you wonder why dogs get such a bad rep for promiscuity.

[nightbird47]

Originally Posted by 6 Foot 3

Just totally speculating here however maybe they're somewhat related to Homo Floriensis ''Hobbit'' people who were alive in Indonesia during the time of Homo Sapiens 94,000 BCE - 12,000 as maybe they were at one time African Pygmies who ventured eastward by sea?

The Hobbits are believed to be Homo Erectus, just downsized and limited to the local area. They still survived long into the era of Home Sapiens Sapiens and were likely destroyed during a volcanic eruption. They would be too primitive to be called Neanderthal, but remains of individual have been found in the last few years all across Asia which are near Neanderthal but not. The suggestion is they roamed much further than we suspected, and had subspecies elsewhere. Perhaps the reverse journey south into Africa also occured. The mixing of Modern European DNA with Neanderthal DNA was in a transitional region where they could have crossed into Africa easily.