• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

AI Found An Unknown Human Ancestor Hiding In The Genes Of Asian People

February 18, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

It’s a well-known fact that there’s a lot of interspecies mingling in the human family tree. It’s clear that modern humans have fragments of DNA from our ancient relatives, like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, but it also appears that other mystery species live on in the genomes of some modern-day populations.

In January 2019, an international team of researchers examined human DNA using deep learning algorithms to analyze genetic clues to human evolution for the very first time. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Advertisement

It’s long been suspected that, further to the Neanderthals and Denisovans, people of Asian descent have a third ancestor that interbred with ancient humans. This finding would help explain the existence of certain DNA fragments that otherwise have no apparent origin. 

Those suspicions were seemingly confirmed by the 2019 research. This long-lost hominid was likely a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid, the researchers say, but little else is known about it.

“About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations,” Jaume Bertranpetit, principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, said in a statement.

“We know that from that time onwards, modern humans crossbred with Neanderthals in all the continents, except Africa, and with the Denisovans in Oceania and probably in Southeast Asia, although the evidence of cross-breeding with a third extinct species had not been confirmed with any certainty.”

Advertisement

The discovery came from the ability of deep learning or artificial intelligence (AI). This, the researchers say, has made it possible to transition from DNA to the demographics of ancestral populations – a task that would have been too complex and cumbersome to complete manually.

Òscar Lao, the principal investigator of the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) in Spain, compared the tech to the nervous system of mammals, with various different artificial neurons that learn to detect patterns in data. 

“We have used this property to get the algorithm to learn to predict human demographics using genomes obtained through hundreds of thousands of simulations,” Lao explained.

“Whenever we run a simulation we are traveling along a possible path in the history of humankind. Of all simulations, deep learning allows us to observe what makes the ancestral puzzle fit together.”

Advertisement

The existence of this new ancestor is also supported by fossil evidence found in Siberia last August. The bone appeared to have belonged to a Neanderthal-Denisovan “love child” – or hybrid. While further analysis revealed the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor, suggesting this kind of interspecies mating was a more regular occurrence.

The researchers say the study implies the cross-species individual was not a one-off but instead, part of a process of introgression. However, they are not yet ruling out other possibilities.

An earlier version of this article was published in January 2019. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Rally marks 1,000 days since China detained two Canadians amid Huawei dispute
  2. NBA-Unvaccinated players to face extensive COVID-19 curbs – memo
  3. Could Dragons On Westeros Fly? Aeronautical Engineering And Math Say They Could
  4. New Emperor Penguin Colony Spotted From Space Thanks To Their Poop

Source Link: AI Found An Unknown Human Ancestor Hiding In The Genes Of Asian People

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “Silent, Ongoing Genocide”: World’s 196 Uncontacted Tribes Are Facing Grave Threats To Their Survival
  • Golden Tigers Are Among The Rarest Big Cats In The World, But They Spell Bad News For Tigers
  • Rare 2-Million-Year-Old Infant Facial Fossils Expand What We Know About Prehistoric Human Children
  • First-Ever 3D Map Of Planet Outside Solar System Reveals Distant World’s Hot Spot And Cool Ring
  • From Chains To Forests: Working Elephants Set To Be Rehabilitated In The Wild Under New Project
  • Why Does Death Have Such A Distinctive Smell?
  • Blue Dogs Have Been Spotted In Chernobyl: What Is Going On?
  • Record-Breaking Gravitational Wave Detection Suggests These Black Holes Merged Before
  • Hurricane Melissa Is 2025’s Strongest Storm Yet, With Turbulence So Bad It Saw Off The Hurricane Hunters
  • Fancy Seeing Your Organs In 4D? Pretty Soon, You Might Be Able To
  • First Known Bats To Glow In The Dark In The US Discovered – But Scientists Aren’t Sure Why
  • “You Be Good. I Love You”: How Alex The Parrot Rewrote Our Understanding Of Animal Intelligence
  • What Would You Find If You Drill Down Deep Under Antarctica?
  • This Is The Safest Place To Sit In Your Car
  • Birds, Hats, And Boycotts: The Story Behind Why It’s A Crime To Collect Feathers
  • Ultra-High-Definition TV – Is It Really Worth It? New Study Figures Out If We Can Even See In UHD
  • Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Will Be At Its Closest To The Sun This Week
  • Human Movement Around Earth Over 40 Times Greater Than That Of All Wild Land Animals Combined
  • Rats Filmed Snatching Bats Out Of The Air Mid-Flight In First-Of-Its-Kind Footage
  • Incredible Planetary System Has Two Stars And Three Earth-Sized Planets
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version