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The Then & Theory team

More than one kind of human

A tree of skulls and bones stands over one living figure. For most of our history the human family had several living branches at once. When our species spread out of Africa, Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia, and Denisovans, known mostly from their DNA, lived farther east. Some of them met and had children together. People with ancestry from outside Africa carry about 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, and some populations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific also carry Denisovan DNA. One bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia belonged to a girl with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

Sources

1. Smithsonian Human Origins, “Ancient DNA and Neanderthals”
2. Slon et al., Nature (2018), the Neanderthal–Denisovan genome