Neanderthal weds Homo sapien: When intermingling shaped human population in Europe

Neanderthals in present-day Europe acquired strange new genetic neighbours about 60,000 years ago, scientists have found. According to a study of hundreds of ancient and modern genomes, this exact genetic intermingling lasted for a very short period of time on an evolutionary scale.

The findings, yet to be peer reviewed, were published on preprint server bioRxiv.

Genetic intermingling between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens: What does it mean?

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The ties between humans and Neanderthals must have been cordial because almost every living individual of African descent carriesgenetic signs of past pairings between the two.

The understood timeline of this intermingling is between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

The researchersfound that Neanderthal-derived genetic contributions in the modern samples could be traced to a single 'pulse' of gene flow starting roughly 47,000 years ago — more recently than originally projected — and spanned some 6,800 years, almost near the time when the Neanderthals were nearing extinction.

Nearly 7,000 years might seem like a long time, but it is remarkably short on evolutionary timescales.

According to Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said this work fills important gaps in ancient human history.

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"One of the strengths of the study is that by incorporating ancient human genomes, they learnt more about how evolutionary forces have shaped Neanderthal variation in human populations," Emilia was quoted as saying in the Nature

But other gaps remain, according to an article in the Nature.

For example, the Nature adds, ancestral human genomic data from some geographical regions, including Oceania and East Asia, are much scarcer than from western Eurasia. East Asia is particularly intriguing, because modern humans in the region retain roughly 20 per cent more Neanderthal DNA than European people.

(With inputs from agencies)